


Bring My Soul To Bear

by narceus



Series: What The Water Gave Me [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-09 07:57:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4340309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narceus/pseuds/narceus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Lydia Martin took being read into the Stargate program pretty well, all things considered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue--in which Lydia Martin finds out about aliens

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a whim that spiraled wildly out of control, which anybody familiar with my writing should know is absolutely par for the course.
> 
> As always, many thanks to into-the-weeds for easing this story along and poking me to finish it. Thanks to her also for the title, which comes from [Nothing But The Water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90A-spXBJXU) by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.
> 
> This story takes place around the beginning of season 8 of SG-1/season 1 of SGA, and approximately twelve years after the Teen Wolf crew graduates high school. (This causes some timeline oddities and means that TW probably takes place in the late 90's, but what can you do.) It's complete in five chapters and will be posted over the next couple of days.

Dr. Martin took being read into the Stargate program pretty well, all things considered.  She didn’t interrupt Sam and Dr. Roberts with a million and one questions, or deny that any of it could possibly true, or have a panic attack when they toured the Ancient tech labs for the first time.  She got thin-lipped and silent when Sam explained the Goa’uld, but mostly she just paged through the lengthy briefing packet with intense calmness and the hint of a tiny, grimly knowing smile on her face.  The “oh,  _that_  explains it” look.

“So,” Dr. Roberts finished, two hours after the tour of Area 51 brought them to this little gray-walled meeting room.  “You must have a great many questions…”

“What about the werewolves?” Dr. Martin asked.  Sam and Dr. Roberts exchanged looks.

“Werewolves?” Sam asked.

Dr. Martin ran her fingers, uncalloused from work or any real experience with weapons and perfectly manicured, over the cover of the briefing file.  “Alien explanations for supernatural phenomena.  Not what I would have expected, but fair enough.  How do werewolves fit in?”

So Dr. Martin had her own favorite piece of folklore.  Okay then–honestly, it wouldn’t be that out of place given the project at large.  “As far as we know, they don’t,” Sam admitted.  “At least, we’ve never run into anything to explain that particular myth.”

Dr. Martin blinked, and then blinked again, her brow furrowing in more surprise than she’d shown in the past hour.  “You haven’t,” she repeated.

“Which is not to say some explanation might not exist!” Roberts hastened to put in.

“There are still a lot of unexplored planets and a lot of history we’ve barely even uncovered out there,” Sam said.  Dr. Martin pursed her lips.

“Why me?” she asked–one of the three most commonly-asked first questions, in discussions like this.  “Why exactly was I recruited for this position?”

“Your research into probability theory and its influence on quantum mechanics is groundbreaking,” Roberts enthused.  “We’re very excited to have you on board.  Dr. Langerly in particular is looking forward to a discussion about how your calculations may be useful in examining alternate realities.”

“And I’m especially interested in the implications for time travel,” Sam added.  “I wanted to meet you right away and talk about some of your equations.”  All right, SG-1 was grounded until Daniel’s gunshot wound healed, and Sam had ended up in Area 51, checking in with several of the scientists working on the hyperdrive project, for lack of anything better to do with herself.  When Dr. Roberts invited her to come along for this introduction she’d jumped at the chance.

“Time travel,” Dr. Martin repeated.  “You want to use my equations for  _time travel_.  What about my background check?”

Sam glanced at Roberts–Dr. Martin wasn’t going to be at the SGC proper, wasn’t directly under Sam’s supervision.  She’d read the full file, of course, feeling a little uncomfortably intrusive once or twice, but she hadn’t noticed any red flags.

“We didn’t notice any abnormalities in your background check?” Roberts asked more than said, looking to Sam for confirmation.  He was a brilliant mathematician, but not much of a people person.  Sam could fill in.

“It came up fine,” Sam said.  “We did look for a good personality match, and you fit our criteria.  This can be a stressful environment, one that involves knowing about some dangerous things that most people don’t have to deal with.  Everything we found on you indicated you’d be able to cope with that.”

“How could you possible evaluate–” Dr. Martin snapped, then stopped herself.  She closed her eyes, briefly.  “I’m going to guess,” she said, “with a program of this size and confidentiality, you went all the way back to grammar school.  Found my name on every available police report?”  Sam winced.

The police reports hadn’t been half as bad as certain civilian scientists in their teens–bad luck, if anything.  At least Martin had never been arrested for anything.  Still.  Sam could understand the desire for privacy.  There was that assault, more than a decade ago now, and they had all the records from Martin’s two months with a counselor, freshman year of college to read about it.  Attacked, possibly raped at some high school dance as a teenager.  Not a pleasant memory.  Not something Sam had any intention at bringing up at what was supposed to be a job briefing.  At any rate, according to the file Martin quit therapy, took a series of self-defense courses, and never went back.  No signs of depression, no evidence of PTSD.  Awful as it was, it showed the kind of resilience to trauma the SGC liked to see.

“A few,” Sam admitted.

“So you want me because my equations can be used in time travel, and you think it’s just a bonus that if and when we come under some kind of actual alien threat, it won’t be the first time I’ve seen a dead body,” Martin said, sharp and crisp.

“That’s our hope,” Roberts offered, a little nervous.

Martin smoothed her skirt down with her hands.  “Well,” she said briskly.  “That’s not what I expected when I showed up this morning.  Will I have access to records about research that’s been done on Earth, about alien technology or beings that have been discovered here and incorporated into our culture?”

“I see no reason why not,” Sam said.  "Is there something in particular you’re looking for?”

So Dr. Martin had a history with something she now suspected was alien tech.  That was clear enough.  Possibly something to do with werewolf myths–well, that would be an interesting first.

“No,” Dr. Martin said, perfectly poised in the lie.  “I would like to see my new office, though.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing else you wanted to talk about?” Sam asked.  Dr. Martin met her eyes levelly, calmly, without ducking away.

“Nothing that I can think of right now,” Dr. Martin said.  “Don’t worry, Colonel.  I signed your non-disclosure.  I’m good at keeping secrets.”

.

“So how was your little excursion to Area 51?” Jack asked.  “Find any new aliens?”

Lord knew he trusted Carter’s opinions of what went on over there more than any of the official reports that crossed his desk.  God did he need this break from paperwork.  Carter and Daniel weren’t officially in charge of hard and soft sciences on the base, but close enough that Jack was going to call this little meeting ‘official’ and Walter could just block anybody else from coming through the door.

“Something odd, actually,” Carter said, which was always such a good sign.  “I helped greet one of the new mathematicians, and I don’t think they background-checked her as thoroughly as we should have." Yeah, that was going to turn out great.  “Daniel, what do you know about werewolves?”

“Werewolves?”  Daniel frowned and blinked rapidly, obviously trying to dig some old facts out of his memory.  “Well, animal transformation myths are present in a number of different cultures, the wolf being one of the more common animals in question, especially in European cultures…there’s a variety of different stories.  What are we looking at here?”

“I don’t know,” Carter admitted.  “But something was off about her reactions.  I think she’s encountered something that’s never shown up on our radar before, maybe a long time ago.  Whatever it is, she’s keeping quiet about it for now.”

Jack raised his eyebrows.  “Did you try asking her?” he suggested.

“She didn’t want to talk about it,” said Carter.  “Which has me a little worried, but we did just give her the entire abridged history of the Stargate program in two hours.  Honestly, I’d prefer it if she decided to trust us herself, rather than us trying to dissect the life story of one of our own people even farther than the standard background check goes.”

“It’s her first week, she’s probably still getting used to working down the hall from Asgard technology and figuring out where the bathrooms are,” Daniel pointed out.  “It’s probably not the best time to interrogate her about her distant past.  This can all be a little intimidating at first.”  True enough.

“So,” Jack said, moving things along.  “Do you think this…new mathematician–”

“Dr. Lydia Martin,” Carter filled in quickly.

“Dr. Martin,” Jack agreed.  “Do you think she’s a threat?”

Carter paused, thinking about it.  “My gut says not intentionally, but whatever she’s encountered before…there’s no telling, really.”  Jack motioned with his hand, a little ‘go on’ gesture.  “She wasn’t surprised,” Carter explained.  “It seemed new to her, but the more we talked, she didn’t seem scared, just…I don’t know, maybe resigned would be the best word for it.”

“Well,” Jack said.  “That’s certainly in no way concerning.”  Not the most concerning thing he’d had to deal with this week, or even this morning, and it was only 0945 yet, but still.  "Well she’s Area 51′s problem for now.  Keep an eye on her, see if the…head mathematician–”

“Dr. Roberts,” Carter offered.

“See if he says anything.  Oh, and Daniel?”

“Yes, Jack?”

“See what you can find out about werewolves.”

.

They’d scattered years ago, really.  There was some attempt to keep in contact after high school, but…

Well.  Nobody Lydia knows really talks to their high school friends any more, anyway.  They’d been almost like family once, a handful of kids clinging desperately to each other like there was nobody else in the whole world.  Funny how something could be so intense and important to a teenager, and then fade as soon as you let yourself break away from it and grow up.  They were adults now, not some ragtag pack of kids thinking they had to save–god, the whole world, practically, hadn’t they thought that way?  A bunch of high schoolers and a couple of so-called grownups, dumb and young and desperate.

And now they were actual grown-ups, scattered to the four winds, not teenage werewolves and hunters and banshees and supernatural crime-fighters straight out of some YA novel.  A mathematician; a waitress and occasional bartender; a stay-at-home dad married to a police officer; an investment banker; a perpetually between-jobs TV actor; a bookstore clerk; a horticulturalist; a high school English lit teacher; an army Captain.  Real respectable adults, or at least most of them were, last Lydia had heard.  She didn’t talk to most of them any more.

She still had one phone number, although chances were the SGC had her personal phone tapped by now.  Still.

“Hello?”  Scott’s voice always sounded a little deeper on the phone, although for all Lydia knew it was deeper in person than it had been years ago, too.  It had been a while.

“Hi,” Lydia said.  The couch in her hotel room was comfortable enough, but she’d need to find an apartment in Nevada sooner or later.  The program was paying for her relocation.  That was a nice perk.  “How’s it going, Scott?”

“Lydia!”  Excited to hear from her all over again.  “It’s good, it’s been great.  Everyone’s dealing with being back from summer break.  I'm sorry you couldn't make it home.”

Lydia hadn’t been back to Beacon Hills for summer vacation in four years, but Scott still always asked.  She didn’t even have grad school as an excuse this time.  “Things came up,” she said.  “New job.  I’m moving to Nevada.”

“Oh really?  That’s great.  Good new job?”  Scott barely even knew what Lydia’d been doing in her past two years as a post-doc, but he was still happy for her.  Oh, Scott McCall.

“I hope so,” Lydia said.  “It’ll pay well, anyway.  I’m working for the Air Force now, of all things.”  That part she could still barely believe.

“The Air Force?”  Scott’s voice was suddenly a lot more serious.  “You joined the Air Force?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, do you think I’m–” Lydia snapped, and then cut off the end of that sentence before she could finish it.  “No,” she said, more calmly.  “I’m working for the Air Force.  They’re funding my research.  It’s good pay and advanced theoretical mathematicians don’t find jobs like this very often.”  Jobs studying _quantum probability_ and _time travel_.  She had so much reading to catch up on this week, it was obscene.

“I’m sorry,” Scott said, not that he had anything to really be sorry about.  “I’m happy for you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lydia said, and wondered how this could still happen, how there was still enough  _there_  for conversations to get this awkward, this quickly, after this many years.  “Thanks.”

“So were you just calling to chat?” Scott prompted.  Lydia hesitated.  Bugs on her cell phone, almost certainly, and she wasn’t about to start spilling secrets now.  Not anybody’s secrets.

“Do you remember in high school, when that…weird thing happened?” she asked, very carefully.  “That one weird thing?”

“Which weird thing?” Scott asked, plainly baffled–why she was asking at all, and of course, which part of the two and a half years of weird she was talking about now.  Scott wasn’t stupid, though, never had been.  He’d catch on.

“The one.  The thing that happened that one time, and then we never talked about again, and it didn’t affect our lives and we never thought about it ever again.”  He had to pick up on the blatant, obvious,  _follow my lead_  lie, right?  Though they hadn’t been in step in so long, who knew?  “And after that we were just normal teenagers finishing high school.”

“What about it?” Scott asked, full of suspicion.  He at least knew she was lying about something.  ‘Normal teenagers finishing high school’ had never applied to any of them, not once, not really.

“They did a background check on me for this position,” Lydia explained.  “If anybody came around asking questions about that one time…I just wanted you to know, you don’t have to tell them anything.”

It was about as much warning as she could give him.  If the Stargate program had recruited Lydia without the first idea what she was, what she’d seen–well, stranger things had happened.  It almost made sense.  Lydia’s math didn’t look like anybody else’s.  Nobody else currently working in theoretical mathematics had ever, to her knowledge, precognitively sensed somebody’s death.  Maybe they really didn’t know.

She wasn’t part of Scott’s pack, whatever there was of it, but she wasn’t going to out him to the US government just yet.  That old loyalty still held.  If people were going to start asking questions because Lydia let it slip that there was more to see in her background than they’d discovered, then Scott should know.  He could get the word out to the others.  He still spoke to most of them, once in a while.

“What kind of questions?” Scott asked.  Lydia looked at her fingernails.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Maybe nothing.”  Maybe they already knew all about werewolves, and banshees, and kitsunes, and every other thing Lydia had ever seen, and they were just waiting to see if Lydia would break first.  “Just don’t be surprised if somebody shows up.”

“I’ll be careful,” Scott promised.  “…will you?”

“I’m not doing anything dangerous, Scott,” Lydia brushed him off with total dishonesty.  No more dangerous than living on Earth apparently was already.  Well, she’d already known she could be killed at any time by monsters out of storybooks.  That was nothing all that new after all.  “Theoretical mathematics, how careful do I need to be?”


	2. In which several humans (and one alien) find out about Lydia Martin

Area 51 was loud, day or night.  Lydia pulled up a white noise generator in her office while she ran through her calculations and did her best to ignore it.

The field of  _science_  was specifically intended to study the physical and natural world, and therefore could not analyze the spiritual, magical, supernatural, or divine.  Area 51 was practically a palace to that kind of science.  There were no gods here, not one, and not a scrap of magic.

People came back from the dead sometimes.  Lydia knew that well enough.  She had a stack of reports on her office computer, listing incidence after incidence of somebody at Stargate Command being pronounced dead and then showing up hours or weeks or years later, all of them true.  It happened sometimes, and it wasn’t magic at all.

It took a little getting used to, but less than she’d expected.  She’d been avoiding mystical, magical, supernatural forces since high school.  It wasn’t so hard to make the leap to writing off everything, ever, psychic powers and possessing demons, druid enchantments, the power of the nemeton, as a teenager’s overdramatic interpretation of actual alien-related phenomenons.  Magic was for kids, science was for grown-ups, and science said that everything affecting the physical world ultimately had an explanation.  Even Lydia herself.

There were diagnostic devices over in the medical building that could examine the molecular structure of cell proteins almost instantly.  Lydia wondered what they’d make of her brain, on days when the labs got just a little louder.  She wasn’t ready to ask because she wasn’t ready to turn herself into the xenobiology department’s newest test subject, but it didn’t matter.  Lydia’s brain was important here because of her intellectual skills, not her precognitive ones.

There was a war going on, and Lydia wasn’t in it.  They could do all the fighting and dying that they wanted over at Stargate Command.  The last time Lydia had lived through a war, she’d been eighteen, and as soon as she had the chance she left and never went back.  Beacon Hills had been quiet for years, and the SGC didn’t need her on the front lines any more than Scott McCall did, so Lydia was going to sit in her comfortable office and turn her white noise generator up by half a notch, and drink her coffee, and do her math.

It took a month or two to find herself in a comfortable rut, but it wasn’t as though she had much to focus on outside of work.  There were maybe a handful of scientists on the entire project who actually had a social life off the base.  A few years ago, Lydia would have sworn she’d be one of them, but it honestly seemed like so much more effort now than it was worth.  She came into work every day with her hair perfect and her makeup perfect and her nails shellacked red and perfect, because she was still Lydia Martin, but she wasn’t  _going_  anywhere with it.  In return, Dr. Lundquist tripped over his own feet when he saw her in the halls, and Dr. Bergner had very nearly given up trying to ask her out, and Dr. Nilson hadn’t quite gathered up the courage to try.  Drs. Alameda and Pasternak were more than a little afraid of her and Drs. Pearson, Skutnik, and O’Cory genuinely hated her, and Lydia did her work, and she went home alone.

There was a very specific kind of power in wearing that much unapologetically weaponized femininity in the middle of a bunch of lifelong mathematicians and physicists.  The ones who could look past it and only concentrate on Lydia’s calculations, well–those were the ones who might actually be worth her time and personal friendship.  She didn’t expect to find very many.

She flirted, of course, she just didn’t flirt with Drs. Lundquist or Bergner or O’Cory.  Lydia had a PhD in mathematics from MIT and the brains to have earned it; she knew better than to give any of the men on her team half an inch.  Lydia smiled and stood a little too close to Dr. Pasternak, who hid behind her long brown hair and tried not to blush, and winked at Dr. O’Cory, who narrowed her bottle-green eyes in what she so wanted to believe was rage, and flipped her hair and teased Sergeant Edison, who patrolled the corridors from 0700 hours to 1500 hours every day and almost flirted back when nobody else was around to see her.  Dr. Lundquist walked into doorways and Dr. Pearson glowered, and Lydia had heard some of the things their male Air Force minders said when she wasn’t quite out of earshot, but it took so much more than a couple of disgruntled airmen to scare her.  Anyway, Lydia still went home alone.  What did they care who she smiled at in the mean time?

It was easier this way, that was all.  God, she blamed Scott McCall.  Ten years later, and Lydia was still ruined for normal men.  She’d never even dated him.  He’d just been there, acting decent and respectful and understanding like understanding and decency were the easiest things in the entire world.  What was Lydia supposed to do after that?  Settle for literally any other single, interested man she’d met in the past ten years?  She still couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Women might be assholes all on their own sometimes, but at least they didn’t think they were better than Lydia just because of their gender identity.

It was two months before she actually saw the inside of the SGC, and Lydia considered them months well spent.  Area 51 was a constant personnel nightmare, with new scientists dropping in and then two weeks later shipping out to Antarctica, or returning from Antarctica after six months with their tails between their legs because of some conflict with the notorious Dr. McKay Lydia had heard so much about, transferring back and forth from the SGC, getting called out for some sort of prep for the Atlantis expedition or some interplanetary Goa’uld-related crisis or any number of other things that happened almost every single day.  Lydia staked out her own office space jealously, locked her chocolate and coffee stashes in her most tightly-guarded filing cabinets, and refused to budge.  She was here for the long haul and nobody was prying her out of  _her_  space.

She’d double-locked her office door and specifically asked Sergeant Edison–implored, maybe, with just a little bit of eyelash-batting and the promise of a hot Starbucks mocha every morning for a week–to make sure nobody tried to temporarily appropriate Lydia’s desk while she was in Colorado.  She’d be gone for four days, conferencing with Colonel Carter and Dr. Lee on some new developments with quantum mirrors.  With all the turnover going around lately, Lydia’d seen entire labs overtaken and repurposed in half that.

Stargate Command was dark gray and claustrophobic.  There was no way to actually feel the weight of an entire mountain hanging overhead–the ceilings were high, the hallways were wide, and for all the base was busy, it was a lot less crowded than Area 51.  Still.  There were no windows.  And it was  _loud_.

“Unexpected offworld activation siren,” Lydia’s SF escort told her when the alarm started blaring and the lights flashing, halfway down the hallway between the elevator and the Level 18 labs.  “You’ll get that in the hallways sometimes.”

“How does anybody get anything  _done_  around here?” Lydia demanded.  Colonel Carter popped her head out of the nearby lab door and grimaced in sympathy.

“Believe it or not, you get used to it fast,” Carter said.  “It goes off in all the hallways, but we get some quiet in the labs except for base-wide alarms, announcements, lockdowns, that sort of thing.  Come on in.”

“How often does the entire base go into lockdown?” Lydia asked, a little too archly.  Her head hurt.  The alarm had shut off, but the echo of it was still ringing in her ears, a little shriller and more insistent in memory.

“Not very often,” Colonel Carter said, with the wince of someone who knew perfectly well that her  _not very often_  counted as anybody else’s  _terrifying_.  “Thanks for coming, Dr. Martin.  I have something I want to show you.”

The morning dragged by.  It wasn’t fair–Colonel Carter was obviously brilliant, with good ideas and a sound sense of how to put Lydia’s math to practical work, not to mention both attractive and easy to talk to.  Lydia just couldn’t shake the headache pressing in around her temples.  Carter stood up to shuffle some figures around on the white board, and Lydia slumped back in her chair, eyes closed, rubbing behind her ears at the tensest part of her jaw joints.

“Dr. Martin?” Carter asked.  “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, it’s just the damn sirens,” Lydia sighed, forcing her eyes open so she could meet Carter’s worried look.  “At least they’re quieter with the door closed.”

Carter’s worried look didn’t go away.  Her brow furrowed deeper, and even as she opened her mouth, before she said a word, Lydia knew.  Lydia was good at knowing things before they happened.

“The sirens haven’t gone off since you got here,” Carter said.  Lydia dropped her head into her palms and _listened_ , the screaming klaxons echoing distantly in her ears, only in  _her_  ears and nowhere else.  Mentally, she revised Carter’s statement–the sirens hadn’t gone off  _yet_.  People died too often at the SGC.  So stupid.  “Maybe we should get you to the infirmary.”

“No,” Lydia said.  It was louder now that she was letting herself hear it, the wailing, and she wasn’t even sure it was really the base siren at all any more.  It was too high-pitched, too pulsing.  There were too many other voices now that she was listening, too many other things going on, pressing against her ears.  “No, I’m fine.”  She wouldn’t scream.  She would not scream.  They were going to need the infirmary for actual injured people soon, too soon, and Lydia didn’t need to know how many or when or  _how_.

“You don’t look fine.”  Colonel Carter laid a solicitous hand on Lydia’s arm, ready to help her out of her seat.  “Come on, let’s just get some air.”

“Stop,” Lydia said, half to Carter, half to the sirens, the goddamn noises.  “Just  _stop_.”  She didn’t need to hear this.  She didn’t want to hear this.  Closing her eyes just made it all even louder.  She could make it go away, Lydia knew how, she just, she just–  “Just—”

“Dr. Martin,” Carter said.  Too much, too much, too much.  “ _Lydia_.”

Too much.  Lydia’s eyes snapped open, and her mouth, and her lungs, and screamed.

For a long, blissful, infinite second, it was all she could hear–her own voice, layered and layered, reverberating, like she hadn’t used it in years, sharp enough to shatter glass, to throw a full-grown werewolf back.  It cut through everything else, the sirens and the burble of the coffee maker, silenced every other voice, the ones out loud and the ones in her head.  Carter stumbled back, grabbing for her sidearm, and Lydia folded down over herself with the squeals in her ears snapping finally into place, not imaginary sirens at all.  The whine of a zat’nik’tel firing one, two, three.

A moment after Lydia gasped silent, the base alarm flared into full wailing life, lights on the wall flashing right here in the lab.  “ _Red alert, red alert,_ ” the PA blared, but it was no good.  Lydia could feel it.  Somebody was already dead.

.

“Sir!”  Jack didn’t slow his stride through the halls, just moved half a step left to give Carter space to jog up beside him.  He wasn’t in a slowing-down kind of mood today.

“What now, Carter?”  Four marines and two medical staff zatted, two of them dead, Major Amherst from SG-7 critical in the infirmary with four of their own bullets in him, and no real answers about just what the hell went down on P9C-541 to send Amherst off the deep end in the first place.  The rest of SG-7 were in mandatory isolation until they could get a clearer picture of what just happened, but honestly, Jack had the gut feeling that it was going to turn out to be just how Lt. Shapiro described.  Amherst got a face full of alien fungal spores on the planet, and just like that, three of their own gone.

“Sir, something you should know,” and the tone of Carter’s voice was enough to actually get Jack to slow his pace a little.  “I was with Dr. Martin when the alarms went off.”

“Who?”  They had a couple of Martins on base, but none of them were doctors.  Unless Captain Martin from SG-11 had his PhD in something, but SG-11 was offworld for the next– “Who?”

“Dr. Lydia Martin,” Carter said, like that was supposed to mean something to him.  “The mathematician from Area 51?  We’re doing some calculations on the Quantum Mirror, and–”

“Please do not tell me this is another quantum mirror thing,” Jack groaned.  All he needed.  All he needed.  “I thought that thing was still at Area 51.”

“What?  No, we were working on simulations.”  Carter actually looked confused at the possibility, thank god.  “Sir, Dr. Martin knew something was going on before the alarms went off.”

Jack stopped, right there in the middle of the hallway.  “She  _what_?”

“She knew,” Carter repeated.  “She was acting like she had a headache all morning, but just before the alarms went off, she screamed.”

“She screamed,” Jack repeated.  Carter winced.

“Yeah,” she confirmed.  “I think my eardrums may still be ringing.”

“Before the alarms went off.”

“Moments before,” Carter agreed.  Jack sighed.

“Okay,” he said.  “Where is she now?”

“She’s in the guest quarters on level 15,” Carter said.  “Two airmen on the door.”

“Do you think she had anything to do with…”  If Amherst picked something up on Earth, instead of on P9C-541, then that was a whole new ballgame.

“I don’t know.  She seemed pretty upset,” said Carter.  “Sir, do you want me to–”

“I’ll talk to her,” Jack sighed.  “Give me an hour.”  SG-4 were due to report back in twenty minutes, and god knew, something else would probably blow up or catch fire or manage to destroy the planet if he took an extra five minutes to stop and think.

“Do you want me to–”

“Please,” Jack said.  It would go better with Carter there, as somebody who’d actually met this Dr. Martin before this morning.  “And have Walter pull her file, I’ll glance at the first page on my way down the hallway.”

“Yes, sir,” Carter confirmed, because when Jack’s day and life went all to hell, there were at least a few things he could still count on, and SG-1 was top of that list.  “See you in an hour.”

.

Lydia had never actually met General O’Neill before, although she’d heard the stories.  There wasn’t a single person in the Stargate program in this or any other country who hadn’t heard  _those_  stories.

SGC guest quarters were a few steps up in space and furnishings from a cheap hotel, if only because they were relentlessly, military-clean and had no sign of ever encountering a cockroach or bed bug in history.  There were no windows.  Lydia folded her hands quietly on the little table and kept her eyes low, on the man sitting across from her and not the woman behind him, or the two armed airmen standing between them and the door.

“How many people died?” she asked quietly.

“You don’t know?” O’Neill asked.

“I didn’t have anything to do with causing whatever just happened,” Lydia said.  “And no matter what I’d done, I couldn’t have stopped it.”

The O’Neill stories said a lot of things–that he was brilliant, or dumb-but-lucky, or dangerous, or flat-out crazy.  That he was a Prometheus stealing fire in a galaxy of gods.  That he’d never accomplished anything but taking credit for the rest of his team’s work in seven years.  Most of it was bullshit.  Lydia knew how grandiose tales could grow in the telling.

He’d do anything for his people, though.  That was a constant, no matter what else she’d heard.  Lydia didn’t fool herself that she counted as one of those people, but at least she could hope to convince him that she hadn’t just killed one of them herself.

“You know, I seem to notice a tremendous amount of wiggle room in that statement,” General O’Neill said.  “How about you tell me what you did do.”

“Did you sense something?” Colonel Carter asked.  “You knew something was going to happen.”  Lydia set her chin firmly.

“Yes,” she said.  “I knew somebody was going to die.  I didn’t know who.  I probably could have figured out how, but by the time I tried it was too late.”

“You knew somebody was going to die,” General O’Neill said, tight as the rope on a trebuchet about to snap.  “And you didn’t bother to try?”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Lydia snapped.  “It doesn’t work that way, General.  I can’t stop it, I only know.  It’s not as much help as you’d think.”

“Wait,” said Colonel Carter.  “This has happened before?”

Lydia bit her lip.  It was going to happen sooner or later.  Maybe, maybe if she was lucky, she wouldn’t end up in an NID lab as a test subject.  She doubted she’d get to go back to her own.

“Yes,” she said.  “How many people died this time?”

Carter and O’Neill exchanged looks.  “Two,” O’Neill said finally.  “One more in critical condition.  I don’t suppose you can tell me whether he’s going to make it through the night?”

Lydia couldn’t hear anything in the room that wasn’t supposed to be there, but that didn’t always mean as much as she’d like.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “That usually means there’s at least a possibility he’ll live.”

“Usually,” O’Neill repeated.  “Okay, fine, how about we go back and start at the beginning, with you telling us what, exactly, you are.”

“How should I know?” Lydia asked.  “I went into mathematics, not xenobiology.  I assume I’m the descendant of some abandoned alien science experiment.  I was born in California.”  Oh, they hadn’t expected that, had they?  “You know we exist,” Lydia said, suddenly so very angry with the whole Stargate Command for everything they’d ever just  _ignored_.  “This whole planet is full of the leftovers of things different alien races left behind.  Don’t be so surprised that some of us tried to study ourselves and ended up here.”

“Us?” O’Neill asked.  “There’s more of you?”

Damn.  Not that she’d seen hide or hair of a werewolf since coming here.  “There’s nobody like me left,” Lydia said, truthfully.  “At least nobody I know.”

“There used to be more of you?” Carter asked, all gentle curiosity and detached sympathy.  God, Lydia had a headache.

“My grandmother died alone in an insane asylum, and Meredith killed herself before I finished high school,” Lydia said.

“I’m sorry,” Carter said.  At least she sounded like she meant it.

“Yes, well, hearing voices in your head isn’t a great way to convince anyone of your mental health, and hearing the voices of people who are about to die isn’t a great way to keep it,” said Lydia.  She wondered if she’d have to convince a base psychologist she was mostly sane, after all this.  At least Lydia was good at faking her way through that kind of interview.

“It’s hearing-based?” Carter asked.  “This…sensitivity.”

“Hearing-based,” Lydia confirmed.  “Genetically transmitted, probably X-chromosomal because it only seems to show up in women.  It came from my father’s side and there’s no history of anything like it from my mother’s family, so it’s either recessive and incredibly rare or there are some kind of epigenetic interactions going on that I’m not qualified to talk about.  I don’t know anything at all about Meredith’s family, so I can’t help you very much with that data point.  It’s specifically linked to the ability to sense death, not anything else useful, and it works both ways in the time stream.  And as far as I or anybody has ever been able to prove, it’s quantum-locked.  Either I only hear a death coming after the chain of events is predetermined, or the act of observing collapses the temporal superposition before it even happens.  I’ve spent ten years trying to figure out which one it is.”

“Translation?” O’Neill asked.  Carter barely glanced at him.  She was too busy looking at Lydia with something like the same scientific wonder she’d had for the quantum mirror equations earlier.

“She can hear the future,” Carter said.  “And she’s not sure if she can hear it because it’s inevitable, or it becomes inevitable because she hears it.”

“There’s a difference?” O’Neill asked, eyebrows raised.

“Not for any practical purposes,” Lydia said, cutting off the discussion of cats in boxes and the Copenhagen Interpretation before it could begin.   “Believe me, General, if I thought I could have saved anybody today, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”  If Lydia could actually save people with her powers, she wouldn’t be here at all.  If she’d ever managed to save anybody, she’d probably still be back in Beacon Hills, not knowing a single thing about the aliens who probably made her.

“Carter?”  O’Neill asked.

“This is amazing,” Carter said.  “No wonder your math is so far beyond anything else we’ve done on quantum entanglement.”

“Enough,” O’Neill said.  “Is it dangerous?”

“Everything’s dangerous,” Lydia said.  “And no, I don’t know what the brain scans you’re dying to do are going to turn up.”

“Who said anything about brain scans?” General O’Neill asked, but Lydia was tired.  She’d rather skip the general’s clueless act, now that he wasn’t about to shoot her in the head for helping to kill two or three of his people, and be done with it.

“I’m a scientist, General,” Lydia said.  “Let’s get it over with.”

.

“Well, she’s definitely human,” Sam reported.  It was 2100 hours, by the commissary clock, and she’d gotten to base around 0800 this morning, but that really just meant that once more she was grateful for a dinner she didn’t have to cook herself or drive home to get.  The mystery stew was even still steaming in her bowl.  “Mostly.”

“Mostly,” O’Neill repeated.  He stabbed at his jello.  Team dinners and debriefings had all kind of blurred together years ago, and it looked like even as General, O’Neill was keeping the tradition up.  Sam sat down in the empty chair at the table and pushed her extra plate of french fries in Daniel’s general direction.  It was good to act like everything was normal, after a day like this.

“The scans showed increased brain activity and some unusual neural pathways around the region responsible for auditory processing, but everything else, bloodwork, biometric scans, it all checks out.  She’s human,” Sam confirmed.

“Aside from the minor business of being able to foretell somebody’s death,” said Daniel.

“Can humans possess these abilities naturally?” Teal’c asked.  “Surely this is the work of a Goa’uld.”

“Carter, if you tell me that one of Nirrti’s old experiments walked right through our front door, I swear to god…”  Since O’Neill probably didn’t know how that sentence ended, either, Sam took pity on him.

“It could be goa’uld, or Ancient or even Asgard, but whatever she is, I don’t think Dr. Martin’s the experiment,” Sam said.  “I ran her files while she was being examined, and everything she says about her background checks out.  She’s from Earth.  Whatever was done to her family, my guess is, if what she says about her grandmother is true, it happened centuries ago.  At least.”

“Is it strange that it’s just that one ability?” Daniel asked, interrupting whatever sarcastic thing O’Neill was about to say next.  “Whenever we’ve seen hok’taur or near-Ascendants or anything like that, they’ve had powers all over the map.  Quantum-locked prognostication related specifically to somebody’s death seems…well, really specific.”

“Actually, that supports my theory that it’s an old mutation,” Sam said.  “When we saw Nirrti using the DNA resequencer, she obviously didn’t understand it that much more than we do.  Her results were scrambled, unpredictable.  If this very specific ability keeps cropping up in close relatives, that means we’re probably looking at the same genetic mutation being passed down through the generations.”

“Perhaps one of Nirrti’s earliest experiments,” Teal’c suggested.

“Or Earthbound Ancients trying to push themselves closer to Ascension and failing,” Daniel said.  Sam pointed at him with her fork.

“Exactly,” she said.  “And get this.  Dr. Martin has the ATA gene.”

“Oh she  _does_?” General O’Neill asked, arching his eyebrows.  “A few more of the old ancestral abilities left than the usual, I take it.”

“It would explain a few things,” Sam agreed.  “I can’t say for sure, but…” It was the barest bones of a theory, but at the end of a day like today it was the best Sam had to go on.  Trying to figure out the mystery of Lydia Martin was a lot less heart-wrenching than trying to figure out what had happened to Major Amherst this morning.

“It certainly makes sense, given what we know about the Ancients,” Daniel agreed.  “What about you, Jack, any family history of women who could pass for banshees?”

General O’Neill paused, and for a wild second Sam actually wondered if the answer might be yes, before he shook his head.  “Banshees, Daniel?” he asked instead.

“Well, yes, beautiful women in Celtic mythology who would scream to foretell a death, it’s right out of the folklore,” Daniel said.  “Looks like we found the source.”

“Just what I love, beautiful women telling me I’m about to die,” O’Neill said.  “T, you ever hear anything like that before?”

“I have not,” Teal’c said.  “It is a most unusual ability.”

“Yeah,” O’Neill said shortly.  “Carter, what about this claim that she can’t change or help anything she’s seen?”

“Heard, actually,” Sam corrected.  “Looking at the brain scans, I’d say it’s probably all hearing-based.”

“Carter…”

“Honestly, I’d believe her,” Sam admitted.  “Her own equations are the best model we have for even beginning to understand how a power like this works, temporally, and she’s spent ten years trying to find a way to actually alter what she’s predicted.  I didn’t get a lot out of her, but it sounded like some pretty awful things had happened to some of her friends while she was in high school, and she’s been looking ever since.”

“God.”  Daniel frowned down into his coffee.  “That’s got to be awful.  Knowing somebody’s about to die and not being able to do anything about it?”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed.  Dr. Martin had gone back and forth between snappish and quietly withdrawn all afternoon, and Sam couldn’t blame her.  “I really don’t think she was trying to hide anything from us this morning.  I don’t think there was anything she thought she could do.”

O’Neill jabbed at his jello again, tired and angry.  Daniel was looking distant–thinking about Ascension again?  That wasn’t going to make the General feel any better.

“You are not convinced,” Teal’c observed.

“Two of my men died today, and if Amherst ever gets up he’s going to be eating through a tube for the rest of his life,” O’Neill said.  “And Dr. Martin asked how many people were dead.”

“Which would suggest that she did not already know,” Teal’c filled in.

“Means she didn’t know,” O’Neill agreed.  “Which means that even if this whole…uncertainty thing holds, then maybe if we’d known  _one_  person was going to die, we could have saved the others.”

“I don’t think there was time,” Sam pointed out.  “I was with her, she screamed right before the sirens went off, maybe even right at the moment Amherst fired.”

“But you said she was hearing things all morning, right?” Daniel pointed out.  Sam kicked him in the ankle and he jumped.  “Of course, not that that means you should be holding her accountable for those men’s lives, either,” he corrected just as quickly.  “Even if that knowledge could have done something, if she didn’t know how to use it, or even what the things she was hearing meant–”

“She thought the sirens were going off in the hallway,” Sam remembered.  “We talked about them when she got there, and then we closed the door and she didn’t say anything else.  She probably just thought I was used to it.”

“There you go.”  Daniel gestured at O’Neill, a sweeping, open hand like he was passing along a gift.  “She’s a civilian, Jack, who’s only been with the program at all for a couple of months.  I’m not saying her ability couldn’t be useful, but what happened this morning isn’t her fault any more than it’s yours.”

Which was what this entire conversation was really about, anyway.  Two men dead and another one compromised and shot on General O’Neill’s watch, right in his own gateroom in front of his eyes–with no enemy to fight, nothing to shoot or defeat or blame for any of it.  It was the worst kind of day around here, and Sam knew Jack O’Neill well enough to know that the idea that there was any scrap of information that might have saved the lives of even one of those men must be killing him right now.

“You are not to blame for this morning’s events,” Teal’c said, with gentle reproach.

“Yeah, well.”  O’Neill jabbed his spoon down into the empty bottom of his jello cup and shoved it two inches away across the table.  “You say Martin’s not a threat, fine.  Get her out of the brig and make sure next time she starts hearing things, somebody makes a record of it or something.”

“She’s actually in guest quarters for the night, sir,” Sam corrected delicately.  “We had a couple of airmen pick up her stuff from the hotel.”  And General O’Neill hadn’t actually given orders about Dr. Martin tonight, just…left her to Sam, more or less.  “We’re going to talk more about what she knows about her own powers tomorrow, I think.”

“Fine.  Sounds good.”  O’Neill sighed, exhausted in the way he’d been too often lately, since assuming command of the base, and let his head fall backwards, eyes closed.  “So long as nothing else blows up around here before then,” he added facetiously.

“Careful not to jinx it,” Daniel warned.  As a joke it fell a little flat after today, but the corners of O’Neill’s mouth turned up, just the same.  it was familiar enough to their old banter to feel like home.  They’d be okay.


	3. In which nobody can go home for long

They didn’t get much work done on the quantum mirror, after everything.  Next time Colonel Carter–Sam, Lydia had been calling her by the end of the third day, fine, next time Sam wanted to talk about causality theory, she could come to Area 51.  Lydia just wanted to go  _home_.

Home wasn’t really an option that had existed in ten years or so, but Lydia would settle for her condo in Nevada, dusty rose and desert taupe, with the big bay windows and the three potted cactuses she hadn’t quite managed to kill.  She wasn’t going to call Scott.  Not yet.

She took a taxi back from the airport, because of course when she’d left her car at the condo she’d been thinking about the many hells of airport parking, not how eager she’d be to get back to any space at all she could call her own.  The cab smelled faintly of pickles and something burning.  Lydia was 90% sure that the SFs who’d packed up her hotel room had left behind her cell phone charger.  She wanted a nap.

She staggered up the steps with her luggage, dropped her suitcase half on top of her foot, and jammed her key in the deadbolt lock.  It didn’t click when she turned it left.

Lydia frowned, and twisted her key again, right and then left.  It shot home, locking into place and then opening up again as smoothly as ever, but she hadn’t unlocked it in the first place.  It had already been open.

The door handle wouldn’t twist in her hand until Lydia tried her key in the knob.  Lydia hadn’t bothered to lock the door knob in two months of living here.  She had a deadbolt for that.

The only sounds in her ears were droning insects and the wind catching at the American flag in the courtyard, everything real and physical, no matter how hard Lydia listened, no echo of death at all.  There were other terrible things in the world than death, though, and after the past four days Lydia didn’t think much of her chances for avoiding any of them.

Anybody still inside her condo had to know she was here by now.  What else was she going to do, call the police?  Over a lock they’d probably tell her she just forgot to close herself?

She had mace on her keychain and she wanted her own bed.  Lydia was pretty sure she’d know if whatever might be behind her own front door could kill her.  Hopefully.  Maybe.

Fuck it.  She swung open the door.

The living room was deserted, just the way she’d left it.  The throw pillows on her couch were perfectly aligned, square with the corners of the couch cushions, as perfectly fluffed as a magazine cover.  They were in the wrong order.

Well.  That answered that, then.  Lydia fumbled in her purse for her cell phone, and thumbed through her contacts list for the newest number.  Hopefully it would ring.  Hopefully the person she was trying to call was even on this planet.  Who else could she try, though?  The police?

“Hello?”  The voice on the other end sounded distracted, not entirely a surprise.  Lydia cleared her throat.

“Colonel Carter,” she said.  “Sam.  Did your General O’Neill by chance send people to break into my condo in Nevada while I was enjoying your hospitality this week?”

“Did he what?” Carter asked, suddenly all attention.  “Dr. Martin?”

“Somebody’s been in my house,” Lydia said.  She refused to be shaky.  Shaky was for when this was all  _over_  and _done with_  and this entire week was just another new nightmare to add to the pile.  “It doesn’t look ransacked, but somebody has been here, and I don’t really feel like going through all of my belongings to see if anything was taken until I’m entirely sure they’ve left.”

“Okay,” Carter said, immediately steady and in control.  Damn those military warrior-types, and damn Lydia for being so grateful.  “Where are you right now?”

“In my foyer, talking to you,” Lydia said, lightly as she could, trying not to taste salt on the back of her tongue.  Crying was for later, too, or never if she could help it.  “Should I be leaving?”

“Can you get to a public place?” Carter asked.  “I can send somebody to pick you up.”

“So I take it this isn’t General O’Neill’s doing.”  Lydia didn’t know how much more frightened to feel over that.  She’d hoped General O’Neill had softened enough towards her that somebody would have mentioned if he’d sent SFs to search her apartment.  She’d hoped there wasn’t some other entirely new player after her already.

“No,” said Carter.  “Go ahead and get out of there.  Where’s the closest coffee shop?”

“Down the block, there’s a Starbucks.”  Lydia backed out the front door without turning away from her living room, just in case.  This was the problem in front of her.  She knew the rules to handle this.  “How will I know whoever you’re sending is from you?”

“I’ll text you,” Carter promised.  “Lydia, you know this probably isn’t–”

“At best, somebody broken in and went through my things,” Lydia interrupted the belated attempt at comfort.  She turned on her heel at the doorway and headed down the sidewalk, heels clacking against the pavement with every stride.  “They almost certainly bugged my house.  I’m not playing this game, Samantha, I’m not doing it.  I’m not sweeping for bugs and going home to sleep once they’ve all been found, pretending that whoever left them in the first place can’t just get right back in again.  Not if you don’t even know who was there.”

“Actually…”  Carter hesitated.  “I might have a pretty good idea about that.”

“Do they want to dissect me?” Lydia asked, scathingly sarcastic and not entirely an exaggeration.  “They weren’t looking for my equations.”

“I don’t know,” said Carter.  “For now, we just want to get you safely down to Area 51.  Security should be able to protect you there.”

“We’ll talk long-term solutions later,” Lydia said.  “Call somebody you trust, Sam.”

Lydia sat down at a table in the middle of the room, in full view of two bored baristas and the sparse smattering of a weekday afternoon Starbucks crowd, with a non-fat hazelnut mocha and a blueberry muffin.  She blinked at the screen of her laptop.  She should have gone for decaf.  She should have trained herself to carry concealed weapons through high-security military facilities without tripping alarms.  Allison would have.

Lydia didn’t think about Allison any more, and she wasn’t about to call Scott,  _especially_  not now when her every move was probably being watched, so she was just going to have to trust the US Air Force to get her out of this one.  God help her.  She shredded her muffin, bit by bit, and closed her work files before she did more harm than good.  There was always solitaire.

Carter’s help, when he arrived, turned out to be a fresh-faced Marine Lieutenant who didn’t look like he could be even a year out of basic training.  Lydia wasn’t much encouraged, until Lieutenant Ford shifted so she could see the zat gun tucked subtly under his uniform.  She felt almost a fraction of an ounce better after that.

The car was dark blue, completely nondescript, and almost screamed ‘secret government agency.’  Lt. Ford drove like he was used to going ten miles above the speed limit, minimum, and kept realizing she was there in the passenger seat and throwing on the breaks with a wince.

“Am I sleeping in my office tonight?” Lydia asked.  She wasn’t hugging her laptop to her chest like a teddy bear, she just didn’t want it jolting around if Ford’s driving got any jerkier.  She still had her weekend bag completely packed, although everything in it needed a quick trip through the laundry.

“They’ve got guest quarters at Area 51, ma’am,” Ford said.  “But if you’d like to go to your office first…”

“Please,” Lydia said.  She needed to see something, somewhere, was still hers.

Any hope of that fled completely the instant she saw Sergeant Edison in the hall.  Edison’s eyes went wide, surprise and sudden worry.  Lydia’s heart sank to the pit of her stomach.

“Do I still even have an office?” Lydia snapped, sharp because she was done, far too done to care about nice or polite or Sergeant Edison’s pretty eyes.

“They said you weren’t coming back!” Edison protested, glancing back and forth between Lydia and Lt. Ford nervously.  “Ma’am.  Sir.”

“Just…just show me,” Lydia said, too tired to have this conversation any more.

They must have just cleared it out that morning.  As precious a commodity as space was around here, no office would have lasted empty for more than a day.  They’d even taken the potted plants.

Lydia sank to her knees on the institutional gray carpeting, wondering why she’d ever thought working with people who knew things about aliens would ever go differently than this.  How stupid was she?  She should just go back to Beacon Hills and be done with it.  She’d bring them–whoever they even were–right to Scott’s door, if she hadn’t already.  They couldn’t fight something as big as the entire US government.

“Ma’am–Dr. Martin.”  Ford was worried.  He worked for the SGC, surely he was used to being worried by now.  “I’m going to call Colonel Carter.  It’ll be okay, I promise.”

Dumb young kids these days.  Lydia had seen so many people die by the time she was his age.

.

“Daniel!”  He jumped in his chair; he’d been so engrossed in the markings from the latest bits of Ancient rubble SG-17 had brought back, he hadn’t even noticed Sam come to his door.  “Want to take a field trip?”

“Where?” Daniel asked.  He really did need a break from the translations.  He blinked, again, and rubbed at his eyes; Sam was in street clothes with a gun holster under her coat and an extra zat in hand.  “Right now?”

“Area 51,” she said.  “Somebody cleared out Lydia Martin’s lab while she was here, and they broke into her house.  I don’t want this to turn into common knowledge around the base, but I could really use some backup.”

“Wait, you think it was an inside job?” Daniel asked, already rapidly rescheduling the rest of his day in the back of his head.  He could bring his laptop and work on the plane… “Because of what happened the other day?”

“Nobody could have known about her unless they had a mole in the SGC,” Sam said.  “According to the MPs at the facility, three people in suits walked right in and packed up the whole office.  They had all the proper identification and clearances, everything.”

“If we weren’t sure they’d imploded, I’d say that sounds like the NID,” Daniel said.  “Whoever it is, they work fast.”

“Too fast,” Sam agreed grimly.  “That’s why I want to get down there before they get to Dr. Martin herself.  You might not be too far off with that NID guess.  I think it might be the Trust.”

Daniel snapped his laptop shut and grabbed his carry-bag.  Yeah, that was worth heading out for ASAP.  “Air Force jet?”

“Already waiting,” Sam agreed.  “Teal’c is arming up and finding his hat.”

It was on the tip of Daniel’s tongue to ask where Jack was, but of course Jack was in his office.  SG-1 as a three-person unit was going to take a lot of getting used to.

.

The first thing Sam noticed was how cautious Lt. Ford was in Lydia’s presence.  The second was the lack of mascara.

Any tear tracks had been washed away, but Lydia hadn’t put her eye makeup back on.  Sam had only really known her for a few days, but she was pretty sure that fact, more than anything, spoke to how shaken Lydia Martin really was.

“Hey,” she said, careful, mentally revising everything she’d been planning to say.  Lydia blinked up at her–Sam in civvies, as unthreatening as she could make herself look while still heavily armed, and Daniel and Teal’c looming behind her, ready for just about anything between them.  “Let’s get out of here.”

.

After Colonel Carter relieved Lieutenant Ford of his duty, she led Dr. Martin, Daniel Jackson, and Teal’c out of the facility to their vehicle.

“So, who’s hungry?” suggested Daniel Jackson, who appeared in no hurry to inquire about the circumstances that led to their visit.  “I got a little distracted by those translations, I actually missed lunch, and it’s already dinnertime.”

Teal’c was sure that Daniel Jackson had in fact missed lunch today.  It was a useful ploy to put Dr. Martin at ease, and all the better for being true.

“I too am hungry,” Teal’c agreed.

“You know, I always end up at the Area 51 cafeteria when I’m out here helping out,” Colonel Carter said.  “What’s good around here?”

Judging by the look on Dr. Martin’s face she was in no way fooled.  All the same, she appeared slightly more relaxed.  “Mexican,” she said.  “There’s nothing for miles but Tex-Mex, diners, and chain steakhouses.  And one nice Italian place.”

“You know, I could go for some pasta,” Daniel Jackson said.  “Sam, Teal’c?  Italian?”

“Sounds good to me,” Colonel Carter said.  Teal’c inclined his head in agreement, and opened the front passenger-side door.

“Would you care to sit here?” he asked Dr. Martin.  “You would be of great help in navigation.  Daniel Jackson gives very poor driving directions.”

Daniel Jackson made a noise rather like a surprised  _kafiit_  bird in protest.  Dr. Martin smiled.  It would, if nothing else, aid her to feel of use.

“I can do that,” she agreed.  

Dinner was not a lively affair, but Dr. Martin appeared significantly cheered nonetheless.  They did not speak of the Trust, although Teal’c knew that Colonel Carter had spoken at length with the security forces at Area 51.  Nor did they speak of the Stargate Program, even in code, as SG-1 had done in public in the past.  Instead, Daniel Jackson spent some time discussing the history of various cultures’ use of noodles and the agriculture of ancient Italy.  Teal’c had long known that his teammate could speak at length on any number of topics, and would do so when given the slightest opening.  Eventually Dr. Martin regained enough of her composure to interrupt him and begin a discussion of fine wine.  She was apparently something of an expert.  Indeed she drank several glasses with dinner.

It afforded Teal’c the opportunity to observe Dr. Martin while she was not carefully controlling her actions.  He had not had that opportunity at the base earlier, and General O’Neill had requested that Teal’c report back with his impressions.  Although Colonel Carter was clearly very much invested in helping Dr. Martin, Teal’c did not believe that General O’Neill entirely trusted the mathematician yet.

It was difficult to say whether Dr. Martin truly trusted SG-1, or simply did not feel that she had other options.  She appeared mentally and emotionally tired, as well as physically.  She allowed herself to become mildly intoxicated despite the threat against her, which did not speak well of a warrior, but was perhaps an excellent indication that Dr. Martin was not in fact a warrior of any kind.  She was a civilian, and one under the SGC’s protection.

She might be a coward, which would present a danger if the Trust increased their pressure on her.  She had spent many years refusing to use her powers.  She had also, if Colonel Carter was to be believed, spent many years believing that her powers were of no great use.  Teal’c did not yet have enough information to make that judgment.

“So,” Colonel Carter said, far later in the evening.  “We can take you to a hotel tonight, or we can head back to your place.  Either way we’ve got a device that’ll sweep for bugs that haven’t even been invented yet, and the three of us will be there the whole time.”

The smile fell quickly from Dr. Martin’s face, and she set her silverware back on the table.  “That isn’t a permanent solution,” she said.

“No, but right now I’d rather make sure we all get a good, safe night’s sleep before we sit down to figure out a more permanent solution,” said Colonel Carter.  “Think about it.”

“I want to see what they did to my house,” said Dr. Martin.  “I’d like one more night in my own home before our permanent solution says I’ll never get to have one again.”

“Hold on now, no one’s saying that,” Daniel Jackson said, attempting to soothe her, but Dr. Martin shook her head.

“I’ve been a  _freak_ ,” she said, “since two months before my sixteenth birthday.  I’m not sure who I ever thought I was fooling.  I appreciate that between the three of you, I’m at least not the only freak at this table.”

“Nobody here is a freak.”  Colonel Carter spoke firmly, but Teal’c thought that perhaps she missed Dr. Martin’s point.  Certainly nobody at their table could be considered unremarkable by Earth standards, Colonel Carter herself included.

“I’ve got strange genetic markers in my bloodstream,” Dr. Martin said.  “What’s in yours?”

Colonel Carter was visibly surprised at the reference to the naquadah still in her blood, but she did not flinch.  “Nothing I have any reason to be ashamed of,” she said, very levelly.  “And neither do you.”

“Nobody’s after me because I’m ashamed, Samantha,” Dr. Martin said.  “I haven’t saved the world seventeen times in the past six years.  I’ve just been trying to get by.”

Daniel Jackson raised a hand into the air and looked about the room.  “I think that’s probably our cue to get out of a public place and go home,” he said.  “Does anybody see our waiter?”

The tension between Colonel Carter and Dr. Martin relaxed significantly.  It was a wise decision on Daniel Jackson’s part.  For his own, Teal’c believed he did now have the information needed to make an initial judgment of Dr. Martin’s character.  He thought that perhaps Colonel Carter was correct in her belief that Dr. Martin felt shame because of her powers, but she was not a coward.  Indeed, Teal’c now believed that Dr. Martin appeared to be very tired and frustrated in a way he had only seen in people who had been forced into bravery for a very long time.

.

Dr. Jackson followed her awkwardly around her house while Sam fiddled with her bug-sweeping gadget and Teal’c checked the perimeter outside the townhouse, zat gun in hand, ready for who or whatever might still be lurking there.  It meant that he was the only one to see how she flinched when she saw her bedroom.  The quilt was rumpled slightly, near the foot of the bed.  Lydia had made the bed before she left for Colorado Springs, and she was never military-perfect with her housekeeping, but it didn’t look slightly rumpled the way she would have left it rumpled.

God, she was going crazy.  This was crazy.  She’d had too much wine at dinner, but it all just felt so much like Beacon Hills all over again.

Dr. Jackson was lingering in the doorway.  “Can I make you some tea, or anything?” he offered.  Poor man.

“You can get the towels,” Lydia offered.  “Any scrap of cloth they could have so much as wiped their hands on going to the bathroom.  It can all go down in the laundry.”  Fuck them and everything they’d touched.  Lydia had fresh sheets in the linen closet.

Of course, there was no reason to suspect that whoever-it-was hadn’t gone through her stacked linens, too, but honestly.  Enough was enough.  This was Lydia’s house, and she was tired, and she wanted to go to bed.

“I’ll put out fresh towels and sheets for the guest room,” Lydia said, although god only knew where SG-1 were sleeping tonight.  She couldn’t see all three of them piling onto the narrow futon in Lydia’s office, although given some of the rumors about SG teams that went around Area 51, maybe it wasn’t entirely out of the question.  She’d grab a spare blanket for the living room couch.

“You don’t have to worry about us,” Dr. Jackson waved her off.  Well, fine, Lydia wasn’t going to argue about it.

“You can put the sheets on yourself, then.”  She shoved her own armful of bedclothes, sheets, quilt, and all, right into Dr. Jackson’s somewhat surprised arms.  “I’m getting fresh towels.  I want a shower.”

And no, Lydia wasn’t going to ask SG-1, heroes of the entire planet, to stand guard in her bathroom while she took a shower.  She probably ought to be embarrassed at even having them here.  Well, Lydia had faced enough that she’d be damned if she let shame keep her from protecting herself, but there was a difference between fair caution and stupid, anxious, probably PTSD-related paranoia.

Anything that could get at Lydia in her shower in her own locked home with SG-1 downstairs in the living room could get her just as well no matter where she was or who else was around her.  Anything that could get at Lydia in her shower had the ghost of Peter Hale to compete with, first of all, to even begin to be worth fearing.

.

It was almost two hours before Lydia finally went into her bedroom and shut the door firmly behind her, hopefully to sleep.  Sam settled down on the living room couch and exchanged looks with the rest of her team.

“So how many bugs did you find?” Daniel asked.  Sam sighed.

“Eleven,” she said.  “They put them everywhere.  There was one in the furnace room.”

“Why do that?” Daniel wondered.  “Why go through all that trouble to bug the place, and then tip their hand by clearing out her office?  They must have known we’d check.”

“Not necessarily.”  Sam had been wondering the same thing all evening, but she had at least a couple of theories.  “According to the requisitions and records at Area 51, someone did send word that Dr. Martin wasn’t coming back.  Equipment gets reassigned and moved around all the time there.  If she hadn’t already been suspicious about this place being broken into, we might actually have written it off as a mistake.”

“Right after everything that happened this week?” Daniel asked skeptically.

“Or hazing,” Sam admitted.  “I’d like to hope that all of our people would be above something like that, but if somebody found out about her and wanted to send a message that she wasn’t wanted here…”

“Jack would never let that kind of thing stand,” Daniel pointed out.  Sam nodded.

“Of course not, but we might have believed that’s what somebody was trying.  Think about it, there’s no way they actually got all that stuff out of Area 51.  The requisitions people thought they might’ve already found some of the furniture back in the supply pool.  Why go to all that trouble for nothing?”

“To make it look like something.”  Daniel nodded, thoughtful.  “Intimidation.  They make Dr. Martin think she’s not wanted at Area 51, she quits, and if anything happened to her we wouldn’t even know.”

“And meanwhile, they have access to everything she’s ever worked on,” Sam agreed.  With all the regulations they had at Area 51 to prevent technology being stolen…not that it always worked.  She’d have to talk to General O’Neill about pushing for tighter security over there, again.

Teal’c let himself in with the usual lack of noise, easing the front door shut and throwing the deadbolt behind him.  Sam nodded him over to the couch.  “Is that even worth anything?” Daniel was saying.  “I mean, I know you’ve been very excited about her equations, but compared to everything else sitting around Area 51, and in terms of knowing anything about Dr. Martin and how her powers work…”

“Actually, in terms of knowing how Dr. Martin’s powers work, those equations are the best clue we have,” Sam admitted.  “Outwardly or not, she’s been trying to explain her own abilities for years.  It may have just looked like wild theories, but now, knowing what she can do…”

“It’s like proof of concept.”  Daniel was as quick to pick up Sam’s line of reasoning as usual.  “Someone actually can predict the future in a way that probably has to do with these equations, so now they’re a hot commodity.”

“I’m worried they’re still not as hot a commodity as Dr. Martin herself.”  Sam grimaced.  “The NID never worried about stooping to kidnapping before, and I don’t want to know what they’d do if they had her.”

“Teal’c, any sign of them outside?” Daniel asked.  “Maybe how they got in?”

“I believe they entered through the front door,” Teal’c said, which Sam had been afraid of.  “I found no footprints in the dirt around the building, nor any signs of tampering with any of the windows.  I believe the lock may have been picked, however aside from the bugs I found no further clues.”

“The IDs on those men at Area 51 were a total dead end,” Sam reported.  “I had somebody back at base tracking them down all day.  They’re all linked to valid names in the system, but the photos were changed to match the men using them, and there’s no way to tell who the men in question really were.  Most of the names they used were from people who’re currently in Antarctica.  The bugs they planted are definitely too advanced to be Earth tech, but I don’t recognize them, and now whoever planted them knows they’ve been disabled.”

“So in other words, we know somebody’s after her, but we don’t know who, and they know we’re onto them,” Daniel summarized.

“Indeed that would appear to be the situation,” Teal’c agreed.

“Yeah,” Sam said.  “Pretty much.”

“Great.”

Okay, Sam needed to break this up before they talked each other into depression before they’d even really begun.  “I think that’s enough for tonight.”  Daniel was getting morose and even Teal’c looked frustrated.  Better to take a break and come back to it in the morning.  Sam stood up and stretched; she hadn’t touched the wine at dinner, and Lydia had a sleek, high-end coffee maker in the kitchen.  It was a lot more than they had on offworld missions, that was for sure.  “I’ll take first watch.”

.

Things didn’t necessarily always look brighter after a good night’s sleep, and Daniel hadn’t so much had a good night’s sleep as a few hours on the living room couch before he got up to take third watch a couple of hours before dawn, but there was coffee.  Coffee always helped.

Sam made blueberry pancakes from scratch while Dr. Martin threw another load of laundry in the machine and Teal’c took another sweep of the perimeter, eyes peeled for any sign that they’d been watched last night.  Daniel rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and refilled the coffee pot and flipped through the Friday morning pseudo-news talk shows, one pleasant banality after another.

Sam put on some bacon and Daniel tried to set the table before he realized that he didn’t know where any of the dishes were.  Dr. Martin took over and shoved him over towards the sink to wash out Sam’s bowls and measuring cups, and a fresh set of glasses for orange juice, just in case anybody had been through Dr. Martin’s cabinets too.  Teal’c came back and poured himself a cup of coffee, and aside from a few yawned ‘good morning’s, nobody said anything at all.

Sam carried the stacks of breakfast over to the table, and Dr. Martin produced syrup and butter, and Daniel poured the orange juice around, and Teal’c turned off the television, and they all sat down.

“Looks great, Sam,” Daniel said.

“I concur,” Teal’c agreed.

“Yeah, thanks,” Dr. Martin chimed in.

“It’s nothing, really, everybody dig in,” said Sam, and that was it.  Immediately the whole table lapsed into silence again.  The pancakes were good, and SG-1 had been together long enough that they could go hours in companionable, easy quiet, but this wasn’t really that kind of silence.

“So,” Daniel started.

“So what’s next?” Dr. Martin asked.  “We can put off talking about it until breakfast is over, but I doubt it will help.  Where do we go from here?”

“If this is really the Trust…”  Sam grimaced.  “We have a few options.”

“Such as?” Dr. Martin asked, pronouncing each word with careful precision and very casually gesturing with her breakfast knife.

“Well, we’re sort of at a dead end trying to track them down,” Daniel explained apologetically.  “Now, we can keep trying, I’m sure we can get you a security detail until we find something, we can contact Agent Barrett, he’s the NID agent who’s helped us with the Trust before…”  SG-1 couldn’t stay here indefinitely, but the Air Force had plenty of resources.  They’d taken people into protective custody plenty of times before.

“And if I don’t want to need a bodyguard?” Dr. Martin asked.

“You could transfer to the SGC,” Sam said.  “That might actually be the easiest solution.  They’re a lot less likely to be able to get to you there, and when they see they can’t get near you, they might lose interest.”

“I could probably just move right in,” said Dr. Martin.  Daniel definitely detected a hint of sarcasm in her tone, but Teal’c appeared to take it at face value.

“Indeed you could,” he said.  “I myself have only recently obtained an apartment of my own.  For many years I have lived in the base at Stargate Command.”

“It’s not the most comfortable,” Daniel said, with a little wince both for Dr. Martin and for Teal’c, though at least Teal’c had never seemed to particularly mind his small quarters.  “But it’s definitely liveable.”

“Would quitting the SGC do me any good at all?” Dr. Martin asked.  “If I changed my name and disappeared to some small town in the middle of nowhere and never bothered anything to do with aliens again, how long before they tracked me down?”

Daniel and Sam exchanged glances.  “We have some people who can build some pretty airtight identities,” Sam hedged.  “But I don’t know how long they’d hold up against the Trust.”

“So only safe place on this planet for me is buried underneath a mountain,” Dr. Martin said.  “Wonderful.”

“Actually…”  Daniel had thought of one other possibility somewhere in the wee hours of this morning, he just wasn’t sure if anybody was going to like it.  “That may not be the safest place.  Even on Earth.”

Sam looked as surprised as Dr. Martin, though Teal’c just took another bite of his pancakes.  “Where else?” Sam asked, cautiously optimistic.

“I’m supposed to fly to Antarctica next week,” Daniel said.  “Just for a month or so, unless Jack lets me stay longer, but even if the Trust did somehow manage to infiltrate an operative there, it’s a very small, isolated base.  There’s nowhere for them to go.”

“And you do have the gene,” Sam pointed out, obviously considering this new plan thoughtfully.  “I’m sure they’d love to have you on the research team down there.”

“In the snow.”  Dr. Martin sighed.  “You know, I’m from California.”

It wasn’t a no.  She was frustrated, and Daniel could easily imagine Jack starting to get a little impatient, but Jack wasn’t here.  Sam seemed to like Dr. Martin a whole lot and Teal’c didn’t get impatient with anybody, at least so that it showed.

“There’s also the distinct possibility…” Daniel began, and then hesitated, imagining all the different ways Dr. Martin might take the offer–if he could even follow through.  “Look, I’ve been corresponding with Dr. McKay and a few of the other researchers down in Antarctica, and I’m pretty sure we’re very close to a breakthrough on the location of Atlantis.  It’s why I’m going down there.”

“You want me on the Atlantis expedition?”  Dr. Martin looked incredulous.  “I’m not a field scientist.  I’m a mathematician.”

“I hear they’re desperate for people with the gene to sign on for that expedition,” Sam pointed out.  “Anyway, that could be a long way off still.”

“Right yes of course, of course, there’s no guarantee and certainly no guarantee that anything will happen soon, but at the very least Antarctica might be a good choice for right now,” Daniel said.  “Dr. Weir will be thrilled to have another gene carrier at the facility.”

“Look, we don’t have to decide for sure over breakfast,” Sam said.  “You should just think about whether you want to try to stay here for a while or you’d rather come back to Colorado Springs with us.”

“I’ll want to pack a much larger bag,” Dr. Martin said.

.

It wasn’t really a hard decision.  None of it was, when Lydia thought about it.

There were people watching her, after her, wanting to use her for something–well, fine.  She’d been there before.  The difference was, this time none of the people Lydia loved were standing in the way.

If she could manage to send Scott a completely innocuous post card, would he remember the last time Lydia wrote ‘ _Don’t follow me_ ’?  Would he listen?

If she stayed here, somebody was going to get hurt.  If she stayed in the SGC, where they knew too much about what Lydia was already, somebody was going to start asking the wrong questions.  Somebody was going to start looking too hard.  Maybe it would be Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson knocking on Scott’s front door instead of this Trust, but sooner or later it would be somebody.

Nobody had to know what she could do in Antarctica.  Nobody had to know anything about her at all.  And with the general crisis rate around the SGC, everybody else would forget about Lydia soon enough.  She wasn’t the first odd alien experiment they’d met, not by a long shot.  They didn’t need to start prowling around their own planet, looking for others.

She didn’t want to leave her things.  Her lab, or whatever was left of it, her cacti, her perfectly-coordinated couch cushions, her original pieces of modern art, the wardrobe she’d assembled so carefully of all the most classic fashion.  Lydia  _made_  this life, herself, for herself.  Nobody else’s hands had done it.  It was hers.

Her life.  Well.  She hadn’t actually seen Scott McCall in person in something like three years, but apparently Lydia would still give her life for him and his pack without really blinking.

Lydia would survive, one way or another, and Scott and whatever mismatched pack he had now would never need to know the difference.  It was only Antarctica.

She’d have to send a message that she’d be out of contact for a while, though.  Something cheerful and chatty that nobody would ever think she wrote under duress.  The last thing anybody needed was the True Alpha of Beacon Hills trying to mount a rescue mission on Cheyenne Mountain.

Let alone anybody else he might send.

 


	4. In which there is ice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woops, let this one get a little behind on posting! FYI, this particular story is entirely finished and edited, I'm just posting it out slowly because I'm trying to write a few chapters ahead of where I'm posting.
> 
> And no, this isn't the end--not by a _long_ shot. Just you wait :)

Antarctica was cold and white, and nobody seemed to know or care what Lydia had been sent there for, as long as she could work.  She didn’t know much about engineering, but she’d never quite lost the knack for archaic Latin, and Ancient wasn’t all that different.  And Ancient math, of course, was no different than math in English or in Chinese, except that the symbols had changed.  Maybe Lydia couldn’t coax the computers into spitting up new chunks of Ancient code, but she could forge her way through what they had.

She was there before two days before Rodney McKay found her, perched on the edge of a lab table with a data pad in her lap, ankles swinging in time with the music on Dr. Simpson’s iPod.  Well, she’d had a two-day reprieve, anyway.

“You,” Dr. McKay said, jabbing a finger directly in Lydia’s direction.  “You’re the new gene-carrier.”

Simpson caught Lydia’s eye, out of Dr. McKay’s line of sight, and gave an exaggerated eye roll.  Lydia smiled at her, quick and genuine, and then turned it on Dr. McKay with all sugar and just a little bit of bite.  If they actually made it to Atlantis she’d probably have to do without makeup sooner or later, but for now she’d stocked up enough that her eyes could be smoky and her lips could be perfect candy pink for months.

“And you must be Rodney McKay,” Lydia said.  “Pleasure to meet you.”

McKay blinked rapidly, his pointing finger wavering as though he’d just completely lost his train of thought.  “It is?  I mean, of course it is, but that’s hardly the point, come on, come on, there’s no excuse for why you haven’t been to sit in the chair yet.  Whatever you’re working on, it can wait.”

No wonder all the other scientists had told Lydia to steer clear of McKay as much as possible.  She’d been hearing about his reputation and ego ever since she started at Area 51.  Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d fluffed up some overblown man’s self-image just to get him out of her way.  Lydia set her data pad aside and slipped down from the edge of the table, still smiling.

“Well then, Dr. McKay,” she said.  “Lead the way.”

Everyone had  _seen_  the chair, impressive as it was.  Lydia had given Dr. McKay one more day, max, before he dragged her off to sit in it.  She’d actually gotten a little more time than she’d expected.

Most of the Ancient tech around here was broken or powered down, bits and pieces that didn’t do much more than hum.  Some of them, Lydia wasn’t quite sure whether she heard the humming with her ears or not.  She hadn’t asked yet.  There hadn’t been any explosions or disastrous lab accidents yet.

“Okay, sit,” McKay said, gesturing abruptly at the chair.  “Sit back, get yourself comfortable, and try to think about where we are in the universe.”

Lydia eyed the chair.  It sat quietly, not a hum or a chirp, and didn’t move at all.

“Come on, come on, we don’t have all day,” McKay said.  Lydia rolled her eyes and sat down.

 _Think about where we are in the universe_.  Think about– think–

The chair tilted back and the wave of sound crashed over Lydia, a thousand-piece orchestra all bursting into full symphonic harmony at once.  The 1812 Overture, Beethoven’s 5th, Holst’s Mars, Carmina Burana, all of it, all at the same time.  She couldn’t see, her eyes blurred shut and she couldn’t see anything, but what she could hear–oh god, she couldn’t hear her own choking gasp or her thundering heartbeat, because she was hearing everything.

There was a pattern to it, a harmony,  _think of where we are in the universe_ , the music of the spheres, but it was so much, too much.  It was all rolling around inside her head, inside her, impossibly beautiful in all the places where all the ghosts and shadows came to say hello.  Nothing had been this loud in–in so many years, not since the massacre, the last one, all the gore and bodies on the ground.

And this didn’t sound like a massacre, not like a death at all, except that it was changing, strings twanging sour, listening to her thoughts and giving her exactly what she was asking for.   _Think of where we are in the universe_ , no, no, noise like this could only make Lydia think of battle and death and genocide, bodies on the ground, the wailing  _screech_  like the scream of violins and so many bodies on the ground…

Lydia threw herself to the side, banged her hip hard enough to bruise bone on the arm rest, lurched to the floor, to her hands and knees.  Quiet.  Her mouth was dry, too dry, her throat was raw.  She didn’t even remember screaming.

“Dr. Martin.  Dr. Martin!” somebody was saying.  Not Dr. McKay.  Scottish accent, somebody crouching down at her side.  Lydia flinched away.  “It’s okay, Dr. Martin, I’m a medical doctor, I’d like to help you.  It’s all okay now.”

Lydia gagged on nothing and let Dr. Beckett put his hand on her shoulder, sturdy, physical, real.  Another gasping dry heave, choking back bile, and then she could breathe again.  She sagged, sat back on her heels, and raised her head to look around.

McKay was typing frantically on a data pad, hot on the trail of some genius breakthrough or another.  The other fifteen people standing there were just staring.

“I said that’s enough, let’s give Dr. Martin some space.”  Dr. Weir waved the onlookers away, except for McKay, and Dr. Beckett, and Daniel Jackson standing back on the other side of the room, far away from her.  Of course he’d be worried, if Lydia screamed.  He was the only person here who knew he had reason to be.

“I’m fine,” Lydia croaked, hoarser than she expected.  She coughed, and tried again.  “I’m fine, I’m fine, it didn’t do anything to me.”

“You were screaming fit to bring this whole place down, love,” Dr. Beckett chided gently.  Lydia grabbed his arm for leverage and pushed to her feet.

“What happened?” she asked Dr. McKay.  He barely glanced up in her direction.

“Yes, I was about to ask you the same question.  I said think about where we are in the universe, not…whatever garbled readouts we just got.”  He jabbed three keys in quick succession, and glared at his computer screen.  “It was clearly trying to pull up some kind of database entry, we simply don’t have the monitors or the interface…”

“We can worry about that later,” Dr. Weir interrupted.  “Dr. Martin, are you sure you’re alright?  Can you describe what happened?”

“It was loud,” Lydia said, sounding pathetic even to herself.  “The mental component of Ancient technology.  I process it as sound.  All of it.  It was too much, all at once.”

“And that’s why you screamed?” Dr. Jackson asked, so obviously wary.  Lydia nodded.

“Just that,” she said, directly to Dr. Jackson.  Whatever deaths the chair had been trying to tell her about, they were thousands of years gone and done.  Dr. Jackson nodded back.  Fine.  They were fine.

Lydia took a deep breath and realized suddenly that she was leaning on the back of the chair.  She jerked away and almost toppled over, saved by Dr. Becket at her elbow.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” Dr. Weir suggested.  “Make sure you get something to eat.  And Rodney?”  McKay kept typing along, oblivious.  “Rodney!”

“Hmm?  Oh, yes, yes?”  Lydia was pretty sure that Beckett and Jackson both saw Elizabeth’s little sigh of tolerant exasperation when McKay finally glanced up at her, but McKay certainly didn’t.  “I don’t think we’re going to get much out of whatever information Dr. Martin managed to access unless we put her back in the chair, but I’m getting all sorts of feedback on the way the system is supposed to be displayed–it’s really remarkable, with this I can design a set of monitors that can properly interface with the data–”

“Rodney,” Dr. Weir said, one more time.  “Let’s not put Dr. Martin back in the chair if we can help it.”

There had been dead bodies somewhere, in whatever the chair was trying to sing to her, whatever the overload of information had been trying to say.  Lydia had thought about massacres, and it had tried to give her dead bodies, dozens, hundreds of them.  It was probably records from the plague that wiped them all out.  Or maybe it was something else.  Maybe it was something even worse.

“Let’s get you sitting down,” Dr. Jackson said.  He was a little too used to Lydia as the waif that needed protecting.

It was funny; Allison had taught her how to throw a punch in the first place because Lydia was feeling just this weak.  Lydia learned years ago how to kick, elbow, scratch, and go for every soft spot she could reach.  She’d gotten used to feeling harder than most of the people around her.  She’d almost forgotten what it was like to be right back here.

.

“You should consider telling her, you know,” Daniel said a few days later.  He was close, he was so close, and he didn’t even want to breathe a word about his theories in case he was wrong, but if he was  _right_ …

Well, the Atlantis expedition going a whole lot farther than they’d originally hoped, but it would definitely go.  And if Dr. Martin was really going to accompany it–all the way to another  _galaxy_ –then there were probably a few things Dr. Weir ought to know.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to be able to do what I do?” Dr. Martin asked.  “I don’t get useful information.  I get sounds.  Echoes.  And they never change the future.”  She stabbed at her salad, slightly wilted Iceberg lettuce from yesterday’s supply drop that was already starting to turn brown around the edges.  “Dr. Weir’s job is already incredibly hard, and it’s only going to get harder.  Knowing about me wouldn’t exactly make it easier.”

“You should trust her,” Daniel said.  “She’s your leader.  I’ve seen people try to hide who they are from everybody they know, and believe me, it never works out well in the long run.”

“I hear things,” said Dr. Martin.  “In my head.  I’m not crazy, and it’s not useful.  It’s my secret, shameful sixth toe.  It’s not who I am.”

“Since you were fifteen?” Daniel asked, as gently as he could.  “That’s more than half your life.  And that’s a lot to keep hidden.”

“You wear glasses,” Dr. Martin said.  “I’m assuming you’ve had those for more than half your life.”

“Touche.”  Daniel let the point sit for a moment, took a long sip of his coffee and looked doubtfully at his own so-called Caesar salad.  Then he looked back across the table at Dr. Martin.  “You should still–”

“Are you going to tell her if I don’t?” Dr. Martin interrupted.

He should.  He really should, if only because they didn’t know for sure what any living Ancient might make of Dr. Martin, and Dr. Weir ought to be able to be prepared.  And because somebody needed to be looking out for Dr. Martin, too.

“If you always scream like you did in the chair the other day, I might not have to,” Daniel said.  “You can be very piercing.”

“It’s connected to the corollary discharge phenomenon,” Dr. Martin said.  “When somebody screams, their own auditory processing neurons temporarily shut down.  Mine just happens to clear out a little more than yours does.  And you didn’t answer my question.”

Daniel wasn’t fooling himself; it had never really been a question.  Sam had made sure whatever personnel file got sent to Dr. Weir lacked the relevant details specifically because some secrets should only be shared by the people they belonged to. “No,” he said.  “I’m not going to tell her.  But Dr. Martin, honestly, I’m telling you.  Tell  _someone_.  You don’t want to carry this alone, especially not on a mission like this one’s going to be.”  Two hundred people, give or take, on a trip to another galaxy?  This sort of secret was bound to come out sooner or later.

“We don’t even know if this mission is going to happen,” Dr. Martin pointed out tartly.  Daniel must have flinched, or winced, or something, because her eyes sharpened.  “Do we?”

“I don’t know anything for sure,” Daniel said.  “Just think about what I’ve said.”

.

Elizabeth had worked out a little speech in her head, after Daniel Jackson found them the address to Atlantis.  The first person she’d given it to had been John Sheppard.  It could have gone better.

Well, she’d have plenty of times to practice.  Rodney had cut her off three words in.  “Honestly, Elizabeth, if you think there’s any chance I’d let go of this project now that it’s actually going somewhere, just because we might not come back, then I have to question your competence to actually lead us when we get to Atlantis.  I hope that’s not what you were about to waste my time by discussing?”

“No,” Elizabeth said.  She was slightly worried about an indefinite stay in another galaxy with Rodney McKay for company, but mostly she just felt a great sense of profound relief.  She’d have her head scientist.  “But we are going to lose some of our team, and we should be prepared for that.”

“Get us Sheppard’s gene and we can do without half the fumble-fingered idiots on this team,” McKay said.  “There’s plenty of dead weight to lose.  We have  _four botanists_.”

Carson was almost as easy, thank god, although he was already starting to fret about having enough medical supplies to survive without resupply for long.  But then there was the rest of the list–Dr. Danzig, whose oldest daughter had just found she was pregnant with his first grandchild.  Dr. Mburu, who’d looked so stricken at the news that Atlantis might be a one-way trip, and had come to find Elizabeth herself to apologize.  And others.

They only had fifteen gene carriers to begin with, military personnel included, and they’d already lost three–not including Major Sheppard, who had given General O’Neill the kind of ‘yes’ that Elizabeth knew damn well was more like a ‘maybe’.  They couldn’t afford to lose any more.

“Dr. Martin!” Elizabeth said.  The mathematician had her head down and her attention wrapped up in whatever calculations were on her data pad, but Elizabeth knew perfectly well by now that if she waited for one of her science team to take a break and notice her, she could be standing for hours.  “I wondered if I could talk with you a minute.”

Dr. Martin tilted her head up.  Elizabeth had already wondered more than once, what had brought somebody as deliberately and showily feminine as Dr. Martin to an outpost as isolated as Antarctica.  She had the gene, and even Rodney admitted she was a brilliant mathematician.  They needed her.  Elizabeth just wasn’t sure if the offer of the adventure of a lifetime would be enough to keep Dr. Martin with them.

“Here, or in private?” Dr. Martin asked.  The halls around Antarctica were always busy, no matter what, and never quite made it above fifty-five degrees no matter how they tweaked the environmental controls.  At least the smaller rooms could be heated a little more comfortably.

“Let’s find an empty lab, shall we?” Elizabeth invited.  “How’s your work been going?”

“The last set of equations I’ve been deciphering turned out to be code for some kind of teleportation system.” Dr. Martin reported.  “Unfortunately we’re missing at least three quarters of the science behind it, so it doesn’t do us much good, but I’m sure somebody at Area 51 can get some use out of it after we’re gone.”  She stopped in front of a door and opened it, gesturing Elizabeth through with a graceful sweep of her arm.  “After you.”

“So you are planning on staying with the expedition?”  Elizabeth didn’t dare hope that she wouldn’t have to give the speech at all.

“Isn’t that what you’re here to find out?” Dr. Martin asked.

Well.  Elizabeth’s team was sharp, she’d always known that.

“You caught me,” Elizabeth admitted.  She smiled a little, keeping casual for now.  “There are plenty of people who were more than willing to sign on to this project when they thought Atlantis might just be another research base, who are a little intimidated at the idea of a one-way ticket to another galaxy.”  Elizabeth’s mouth twisted up wryly.  “I can hardly blame them.”

“It’s intimidating,” Dr. Martin agreed.  “For some of them, it’s probably terrifying.”

“But not for you?” Elizabeth asked.  Dr. Martin was never an SGC scientist; she’d never been off-world, even as far as the alpha site.  Bravery, or bravado?  Or something else entirely?  She was so very guarded, it was hard to tell.

“I didn’t say that,” said Dr. Martin.  “I have people I love, somewhere.”

“Most of us do,” Elizabeth said.  She’d spoken to Simon a few days ago via video link.  She’d see him when she got back to Colorado, before they finally…went.  Maybe forever, with no guarantee of ever seeing him again, and no guarantee she could even tell him where she’d gone.  She understood perfectly well why some of her scientists were pulling out of the expedition now.  She just couldn’t join them.

“I haven’t seen them in years,” Dr. Martin said.  “I might not ever see them again even if I stay on Earth.  But I love them.  So tell me, Dr. Weir,” she said, and Elizabeth was startled by the sudden certainty that Dr. Martin was very close to the edge of tears and refusing to let on.  She was incredibly composed, except for the tiniest glistening around her eyes.  “Why should I go on this expedition?  Why should I leave?  Why would I ever want to go so far away I’ll probably never know what might happen to the people I care about?  Tell me that.”

“You know what we hope to find on this expedition.”  It was a stumbling intro to her speech, but Elizabeth would take it.  “Dr. Martin, this opportunity we have–if and when we actually find Atlantis?  The lost city of the Ancients themselves?  We could bring back such knowledge, such technology, such insight into the  _universe_ …”  It was overwhelming, when Elizabeth let herself think about it.  Overwhelming and glorious and amazing, and they didn’t even know if the city was still there.

There were people who didn’t feel the same awe, the near need to discover what had been lost, as Elizabeth did.  She understood that, intellectually, and she was good at working with dozens of different points of view.  She’d made a career out of finding points of common ground in any situation.  But emotionally…god, so much knowledge, just  _waiting_  for them.  Elizabeth could understand having reasons to stay on Earth, but she couldn’t understand anybody, particularly anybody who called themselves a scholar or a scientist, who didn’t feel the pull of it.

“We’re doing this for the entire planet,” Elizabeth said.  “Quite frankly, in the long run what we find could change the lives of every human in this galaxy.  Including your loved ones.  Dr. Martin, the world is so much larger, so much wider and wilder than we ever used to think.  And the only way we’re going to get a handle on it is to go out there and  _learn_  about it, whatever it takes.”

Elizabeth came to the end of her speech with a jolt, more passion and raw honesty in her voice than she’d meant to use.  Dr. Martin stood there, head cocked to the side, unmoving and seemingly unmoved.  She’d barely blinked for the entire speech.  If that wasn’t enough…but then, maybe Elizabeth had been too honest, or too emotional.

Then Dr. Martin gave one sharp nod.  “Then I’ll go,” she said.

“Really?”  That wasn’t at all what she’d expected.

“Did you want it to be harder?”  Dr. Martin raised her eyebrows.

“No,” Elizabeth said.  “But I am curious what I said to help you make up your mind.”  It was glaringly clear that Elizabeth didn’t know Lydia Martin well enough at all.  Well, add that to the list of the three thousand things she needed to do in the next few weeks, somewhere after the other hundred and fifty times she had to give this speech all over again.

“You gave me a reason,” Dr. Martin said.  “That was what I needed to hear.”

.

The SGC was very accommodating, in terms of helping the Atlantis explorers leave a few last messages with their loved ones.  Lydia could have asked Sam for a favor, if she’d really wanted to…but no.  Better that nobody involved with the stargate program anywhere on Earth should have any idea how important certain people were to Lydia.  Even Samantha Carter.

She sat in a little, concrete room on the base with her laptop, and recorded a video message for her mother, instead.

“I’m doing good work,” Lydia said.  “It’s just classified.  Incredibly, incredibly classified.  And I probably won’t be able to write or call again for a while, so here I am, telling my mom how much I love her.”  A pause, and Lydia smiled, as wide and genuinely as possible.  She did love her mother.  She really did.  And this was going to be…good, hopefully.  Atlantis would be good.

“I’m happy,” she said.  “I mean it.  This is where I want to be.  It’s not the right place for everybody, but it is for me.  This is right for me.”  They had to believe that.  Everyone, Lydia’s mom, who’d show this to Scott in an instant, and anyone Scott showed this to,  _everybody_  had to believe that Lydia was okay.  It was the only way this next part would work.

“I love you,” Lydia said again, and then grinned, rueful, like she’d been caught out in something.  “I know, I’m saying that a lot, and you’re probably wondering what happened.  Well…I may have gotten into a little fender-bender the other day.”  She could get this past the SGC censors if she played it just exactly right, if they thought all the lies were for Lydia’s mother and none for them.  “Now before you go worrying, I was fine, nobody was injured–see, look at me.”  Lydia spread her hands wide for the camera.  “Not even a bruise.  But it was scary.  I’ll admit that.  It could have been a lot worse, and it got me thinking about time being short.  Telling the people you love that you love them before it’s too late.”

The military censors would expect something like that.  Everybody on this expedition was coming up with little white lies to excuse too-dramatic farewells in their goodbye speeches.  Little white lies for everyone.

This was the important part, here.  Lydia took a sip of water and went on.  “I had sort of a nightmare that night,” she said.  “Do you remember that friend I had in high school?  She and her dad got carjacked, remember?  It all went so wrong.  I haven’t thought about it in years, but…”  And no matter what police reports they read, what the SGC looked into, they’d never know it had been anything other than that.

“I was thinking about what I said to her right before it happened.  What we all said and did that day.  It’s weird what you remember, right?”  Lydia shrugged, tucked some hair behind her ear, and flashed a quick smile at the camera.  “Life is quick.  You never know what’s going to happen.  But I’m okay, I really am.  No tearing my hair out and screaming, I promise.  It’s got to be easier than high school is.  I don’t know how you’ve managed to stand it.”  It might be too much information already, but it was the best she could do.

“So I love you, mom, and I’m doing fine.  Hopefully I’ll see you soon.”  A smile and a last little wave, and that was it.  Hopefully it would be enough.

She could ask Sam to keep the Trust away from her mother, at least.  Lydia’s mom didn’t really have anything to do with anything, and there was no way to distance her from Lydia completely.  She was the best chance Lydia had to get any sort of message back to the pack.

And if the Trust tracked them down while Lydia was off in another galaxy…god.  God.  Lydia wished she could rely on the SGC to keep their distance.  She wished she could be sure the lure of werewolf powers and whatever strange alien technology must be responsible for them wouldn’t override whatever sense of compassion and decency Stargate command had.

Well, there was Sam.  Samantha Carter, who loved her teammates every bit as much as Lydia had ever loved her pack.  And Daniel Jackson, who honestly thought that Lydia could have any kind of life on Atlantis if anyone on the expedition knew about her powers, but who’d also kept her secret when she asked him.  And Teal’c, who didn’t even think of himself as human, who knew as much about killing and deciding not to as any werewolf Lydia had ever known.  They hated the Trust and they saved the world.  It would be enough.  

It would have to be.  Lydia had two more days left in this galaxy.  There was nothing else she could do.

.

“You are the world’s best and brightest,” Elizabeth said, and it was true, every single man and woman standing down in the gate room before her.  “And in light of the adventure we are about to embark on, you are also the bravest. I hope we all return one day having discovered a whole new realm for humanity to explore, but as all of you know, we may never be able to return home. I’d like to offer you all one last chance to withdraw your participation.”

Not a hand.  Not one single hand.

“Begin the dialing sequence,” Elizabeth said, and held her breath to see their future–the whole, bright, impossible adventure of it–burst into being in shimmering blue light in front of them.

.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the lengthy delay.
> 
> The sequel to this story has been in the works for some time, and continues to come along, bit by bit. Needless to say there is a whole lot more to this world, both in Lydia's past and her future, than we've seen so far.
> 
> Thank you all for every kind kudo and comment, and for sticking with me so far!

Everybody at Beacon Hills High School knew the biology teacher.  She’d been there for like twenty years or something; she and crazy old Coach Finstock had probably been around here longer than every other teacher put together.  

Most teachers didn’t stick around here very long, when Natalie took the job.  She certainly hadn’t expected to put sixteen years into this place.  It was really time to start thinking about retirement.  Of course, she’d been saying that for about five years, and here she still was.

She wouldn’t know what to do with herself at home all day.  Last time she’d tried that, Lydia was sixteen.  Now, well…

There were still a few familiar faces around.  One in particular she was looking for today.  Natalie rapped on the door jamb in room 201, half a second before the distant crack of thunder rumbled across the sky.

“I know you drove that bike of yours to school today,” she said.  The man at the desk grinned sheepishly.  He didn’t look old enough for–anything, really.  They’d never really been old enough.  Of course, Natalie would probably think that forever.  Part of being a mother.  Melissa McCall was still saying exactly the same thing.  “I bet you’re kicking yourself now.”

“I didn’t think it would come on so fast,” he admitted.  “I was hoping I could get some of these rough drafts marked before it broke.”  Natalie glanced at the piles of paper on the desk; the pile with obvious red pen scrawled across the top page was about a quarter as tall as the pile without.

“Let me give you a ride home,” Natalie offered.  “You shouldn’t be on that contraption in this.”

“I’m fine, really,” Scott waved her off, because of course he did.  He was Scott McCall.  Natalie had learned what that meant back when he was on the other side of the classroom, sitting in one of the desks in front of her.  She kept waiting for him to grow out of some of it.  It was probably time to stop expecting that.   He grinned.  “I’ve got pretty good reflexes,” he reminded her.

“Scott,” Natalie said.  The corners of the USB drive were digging into her palm.  “Let me drive you home.  Please.”

Scott blinked, and focused in on her face.  His  _concerned teacher_  look.  It was a whole lot like his  _alpha werewolf messiah_  look, and it always made her feel old.  “Okay, yeah,” Scott said.  “I’d really appreciate that.  Thanks.”

Scott stopped to wheel his motorcycle into the covered walkway between the main school building and the sports annex, and they had to dodge raindrops out to the car.  Scott waited until she had her windshield wipers going and pulled out on the street to say anything.

“Should this wait until we get back to my house?” Scott asked.  “I can send Stiles and Bonnie a text and have them meet us.”

“No, no, it’s not like that.”  Rush hour, such as it was, had the cars backed up half a block down from the stop sign at Green and Decatur St.  Natalie inched forward.  “Just…have you heard from Lydia lately?”

“Not in a little while.”  Scott’s eyes flickered in the flash of passing headlights.  “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Natalie admitted.  “She’s been emailing me once in a while, but a few days ago I got this…video message thing, and I think she was talking in code.”  The intersection cleared, and Natalie hit the gas a little harder than necessary; the wheels squealed on the wet pavement before they caught and shot the car forward.  “I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy.”

“No.”  Scott’s voice was firm and serious.  Natalie darted a glance right.  He was sitting straight upright in the seat, shoulders square, jaw set.  “I believe you.”

“I don’t know what she’s  _saying_.”  Natalie gripped the steering wheel, both hands, too tight, to hold herself together.  She’d come to terms with never being able to keep up with her daughter years ago.  But god, whatever Lydia was trying to say, whatever she was doing…

The message wasn’t for Natalie.  She knew that.  That didn’t mean she wasn’t worried.

“I’ll text Stiles,” Scott said.  “He knows Lydia as well as I do.  Bonnie and Felipe can get dinner somewhere else tonight.

It meant something, to know that Scott would clear out his pack for her.  It meant something that he believed her.

“Thanks,” Natalie said.

It was past five by the time Stiles managed to close up the store and get home.  In the mean time, Scott tossed some chicken on a grill pan and made pasta, because “I can’t ask a delivery guy to come out in this.”

“You don’t have to–” Natalie started.

“You need to eat,” Scott pointed out, reasonable and too gentle.  Instead of arguing, she made a salad.  They gossipped about Jeremy Jacobs’ disciplinary problems and the failure of the school social worker to provide a proper IEP, and the latest feud between Bobby Finstock and the newest wet-behind-the-ears principal, and the upcoming auditions for the school play.  Carolina Bellwood was a shoo-in for the lead.

Then Stiles got there, shaking water every which way in the front vestibule–“Weren’t the weather patterns around here supposed to go back to  _normal_  for California?” he asked rhetorically, although this had been normal for Beacon Hills for decades.  “Thunderstorms aren’t actually normal”–and suddenly they were all sitting down at the table with a huge bowl of chicken penne in the middle, Scott setting up his laptop at the other end, and Natalie was passing over the USB drive.

“Last time Lydia called me, she was talking like she thought somebody was listening in,” Scott said, which Natalie hadn’t known.  “She said somebody from the government, maybe the air force, might come by to ask questions.”

“Questions about  _what_ , though?” Stiles demanded.  “What did she think they had on us?”

“I don’t know,” said Scott.  “Nobody ever came, and she didn’t call back.”

“Wait, when was that?”  Natalie frowned.  How long had something been going on?

“About three or four months ago,” Scott said.  “Right after she started that new job in Nevada.”

“She hasn’t talked to you in three or four months?” Natalie asked, genuinely surprised.  The smile Scott flashed at her was too quick to unpack.

“That’s not really unusual,” he said.  Stiles snorted.

“Yeah, when was the last time we got a call from Isaac?”  Scott ignored him.

“Eat, guys,” he said, and hit ‘play’.

Lydia looked good–thin and made up as heavily and precisely as a magazine cover model.  She only ever used to look like that when she was upset.  She sounded happy, though, and ultimately Natalie just  _didn’t know_.

“Hey mom,” she said with a bright, slightly fuzzy smile, voice crackly over the speakers.  “I miss you.”

Nobody said anything while the video played.  Natalie picked at her food.  She’d seen it before.

When Lydia got to “ _she and her dad got carjacked_ ,” Stiles sat bolt upright.  He snapped his mouth shut an instant later, wordless, with a little sound like Scott had kicked him.  The last forty-five seconds played out with Stiles white-knuckled holding the edge of the table, and Scott’s face set, eyes grim.

“Okay,” Stiles said, as soon as the video went quiet and froze on the last frame.  “So we have to go save Lydia.”

“No,” Scott said.  “No, we don’t.”

“Um, I’m sorry, did we just watch the same video?”  Stiles gestured at the screen.  “No way any of that was of her own free will.  They’re probably locking her in some secret government lab for testing on banshees.”  Natalie bit her lip and didn’t look up.

“That’s not what she said,” Scott said.  “She said she was happy and we should remember that time in high school when our friend and her dad got carjacked.”

“That was Allison,” Natalie said.  She’d figured that much out on her own.  “Right?”

“Okay but how does that incredibly terrible reference  _not_  mean that we need to get her out of there as soon as possible?” Stiles demanded.

“Do you actually remember that day?” Scott asked.  “It was a long time ago and you were probably pretty out of it.”

“What’s to remember?  We were kids, it was awful, that thing took Lydia, we got her back, I was wandering around dying–”

“Somebody did die,” Scott interrupted.  Glancing at Stiles’ face, Natalie didn’t think he’d forgotten.  “And it was our fault.  Lydia never said anything afterwards, not to me, but she knew.  She told us not to come get her, again and again, but we went anyway.  I remember.”

They all remembered too much.  Natalie was so out of her depth, and this was why she had come here–to find someone with the same frame of reference for war and heroism and mortality that her daughter had.  She’d hoped…

Lydia had been so happy about this job.  She’d sounded happy, in the first part of the video, tired but proud of herself.  Natalie had hoped that meant that the need for war and heroism was long over.

“So we were supposed to just leave her?” Stiles demanded.  “We’re supposed to just leave her wherever-the-hell she is now on the  _guess_  that she’s not actually saying we need to rescue her and go in planning to sacrifice one of our own to do it?”

“Lydia wouldn’t say that.”  Natalie didn’t mean to interrupt, but she knew that much.  Her daughter played vain and egotistical, but she was as self-sacrificing as any of the young people who’d spent time protecting this town.

“No, but we’d still do it for her anyway,” Stiles said grimly.  “That’s what we do.”

Scott was silent.  Finally, he said, “I trust Lydia.”

“Well yeah so do I, but that doesn’t mean–”

“ _I trust Lydia_ ,” Scott repeated.  Natalie was probably imagining the little bit of a growl in there, but Scott had a firm enough Authority Voice that it was easy to hear.  “There were a lot of other rescues over the years that she could have referenced, but she picked this one.  She’s going somewhere and we’re not going to follow.”

It didn’t ease the worry clenching up Natalie’s insides as much as she’d hoped it would.  Stiles stared at Scott for a long moment, then snorted and bent down over his dinner, stabbing violently at a piece of chicken with his fork.  “You know, this is why we can’t keep a pack around,” he said, with the air of an old argument that Natalie wasn’t actually meant to be party to.  “You always do this, Scott,  _you always do this_.”

“Lydia can make her own decisions, and we’re not going to talk about this now,” Scott said.  Natalie picked uncomfortably at her dinner.  She’d had enough arguments in public with her ex-husband, back in the day, to understand that kind of ‘not now’.  “Can we keep a copy of the video?”  Scott turned to her directly, so she couldn’t just keep pretending not to be here.

“Of course,” she said.  “Just save it over if you can, I’ve got next week’s lab instructions on that drive.”

“Sure, of course,” Scott agreed.  “Does anybody want more bread?”

It was a pointed, obvious subject change, and Natalie was in no position to argue.  She and Scott were friends, most of the time, or at least friendly colleagues, but the Alpha of Beacon Hills was a different sort of creature altogether.  Natalie wasn’t special, she just knew a little bit more than most people.  If Scott said that Lydia didn’t want them to follow her…there was nothing else for her to  _do_.

“Did April Morgenthau show up for your class today?” she said instead, and hoped that Scott’s best judgment would be good enough.

.

Atlantis  _sang_.

Every footstep that lit up a stair was another chiming chord.  The city, bursting into life around them, was a chorus of bells, of strings, the deeper timpani thrum of basic life support kicking in, the sweet smooth oboe sound of the shield around them–

And the echoes, too.  Every place Lydia had ever been had echoes, whispers of ghosts who’d died there.  Atlantis’s ghosts were so, so old.

Lydia didn’t hear the attack on Athos at all.  Atlantis was clattering into life all around them, skipping notes, missing whole sections, a limping, fractured orchestra.  It was a thousand times bigger than the chair, except that Atlantis was big enough to hold it all, big enough for Lydia to stop and breathe and listen, to try to _understand_.

She was so busy desperately trying to translate through some impenetrable database entries for Dr. Zelenka and Dr. Simpson’s frantic efforts to maintain shield power that she didn’t even know Major Sheppard was back, the first time.  And then the shield split open with one final wailing cry, and the city trembled beneath their feet.  Then there was only time to grab on, to hold tight, to grab the nearest strut and cling for balance as the sun broke sparkling over them all.

Lydia heard about everything else that had happened within the hour.  No matter how hard she listened she couldn’t hear anything that sounded like Colonel Sumner or the missing men.  Maybe they were still alive.  Maybe Atlantis and her thousand burbling systems were just too loud, drowning anything else out.  Maybe they were too far away.  Maybe this rescue mission could still bring home every one of their lost men after all.  Maybe she needed to go up to the top of the very tallest tower and scream at the top of her lungs, to clear out the ghosts and the shadows and the echoes and the singing of ten-thousand-year-old computers trying to talk in her head, and then she’d know exactly how they’d already died.

Maybe.  Maybe.  Lydia clung to her maybes and left the gateroom to help McIntyre and Kaselczyk find a bathroom.

She wasn’t expecting the shrieking mosquito-whine an hour and a half later, the coughing death rattle of an ancient, dying man–quiet, but so sudden she couldn’t miss it, cutting in out of nowhere–

And then it was gone.  Instantly just a handful of moments later, nothing but Atlantis singing in her ears.  As suddenly as a wormhole blinking out in the stargate.

“They sent a rescue team, right?” Lydia asked, interrupting Dr. Kavanaugh mid-rant.

“Which just proves my point!” Kavanaugh declared, although Lydia had lost track of his point several minutes ago.  “Irresponsible, unsafe leadership like that is only going to get us–”

She could pick things up through wormholes.  Not over lightyears.  Only through wormholes.

Lydia barely knew Colonel Sumner, or any of the men on the rescue team, and distance had always been a limiting factor before.  Earth was a lot farther away than anywhere in the Pegasus galaxy.  Part of her had always been so sure, no matter how far away she was, that if anything ever happened to…  Deep down, she’d always thought she’d know.

She was waiting for it when the rescue team came back.  Years ago, Lydia could clamp down on any scream, or open her mouth and use her shriek as a beacon, even a weapon, at top volume ready to rip through the ears of any werewolf.  She hadn’t practiced in a while.  Instead Lydia stationed herself deliberately in a corner of the gate room, unobtrusive on the floor with her data pad, stylus in hand to jab herself in the leg if she had to.  It was always easier, if she knew it was coming.  She was waiting for it, and that was why, when the wormhole burst into life, Lydia was able to lock her jaw and clamp a hand over her mouth, tight, too tight for even a squeak to escape.  Last time had been quiet.  Not this.

Someone had just opened a door into the very middle of a swarm of mosquitoes, furious and vast enough to engulf an entire planet.  Billions of swarming mosquitoes, famished and out for blood, everywhere–and the bang of a door slamming open, but it had already happened.  It was only an echo.

Lydia bit the inside of her lip and counted, one second, two, three.  Were they mosquitoes or energy weapons?  Alien machinery?  Was it a slammed door or a heavy weight falling to the floor or a gun going off?  She could tell, if she just let herself, just opened her mouth and screamed for whoever was already so obviously dead on the other side of that wormhole.  Where was the ship, the rescue team?  Where were–

The energy blasts bursting through the wormhole sent everybody reeling back.  Lydia ducked behind a doorway and closed her eyes.  It would end soon.  One one-thousand.  Two one-thousand.  Three one-thousand.  Four.

The gate blinked out.  The noise cut off as solidly as if someone had dropped a thick, heavy curtain around them–almost gone, but not quite all.  Distantly, at the very edge of her ears, and somewhere in the echoes that had been reverberating around Atlantis since long before they arrived, Lydia could still hear the shrill whine of mosquitoes.

She figured out that she hadn’t been hearing the echoes of a slamming door when they all got the full story about Colonel Sumner.  Major Sheppard was already loud with the ghosts of his old dead.  A lot of the military personnel were.  If Lydia went very quiet in the same room as the Major and listened, this was louder still.

So the Wraith were coming.  Here they were, cut off from Earth, barely enough supplies to survive on, no real idea what they were doing between them, and an unknown enemy of unimaginable power coming to destroy them one way or another.  

It almost felt like home.

The day after Lydia stationed herself for half an hour in that same overlooked corner of the gateroom, listening to terse orders crackling over radio and trying to figure out if that hissing, insect noise was really Major Sheppard’s certain death, she woke up slumped over the tiny desk in her quarters, paper stuck to her cheek.  She’d brought a whole ream of it as her personal item, and a box of charcoal pencils, all she could fit.  She hadn’t wanted to use it this way.

The ship she’d drawn was breathtakingly alien, needle-pointed at the bow and spreading wide and flat along its enormous length.  Those tiny specks lining the edges looked like windows.  If they were, then this ship could swallow a small city.

Lydia rolled the drawing up tightly, tucked it under her arm, and went to see Dr. Weir.  Just like home, and remember what had always happened when she’d kept her premonitions to herself there.

It was well into the night shift, but Dr. Weir was still in her office.  Lydia probably shouldn’t impose on her this late.

“Dr. Weir?”  She looked up from the spread of papers across her desk distractedly, but Lydia thought there might be a touch of a genuine smile in Dr, Weir’s eyes, when she focused on Lydia in the doorway.  Relief, maybe, to be distracted.

“Dr. Martin, what has you up so late?”  Lydia hadn’t seen quite that facial expression since Scott used to walk around with it–warmth and wariness, happy to see her and already cautiously waiting for whatever new terrible thing Lydia was going to bring here next.

“I’d ask you the same thing, but I really just need to speak with you.”  Lydia took a few steps into the office, but waited for Dr. Weir’s wordless nod at the chair to sit down.  “There are some things I need to tell you.”

“Such as?”  Dr. Weir’s Concerned Leader look was so much more deliberate and polished than Scott’s concern ever was, but she did care about this expedition.  Lydia folded her hands on the desk.

“I wanted to tell you why I came on this mission,” Lydia said.  “And what I am.  I don’t know if I can help and I don’t really think I can, but I wanted you to know.”  Not for Dr. Weir’s sake, certainly.  This wouldn’t make her life any easier.  But.  “The last person I followed in a situation like this would have wanted to know even if it didn’t do us any good.”  And that was nothing less than absolute honesty.

“I don’t think any of us have really faced a situation like this before,” Dr. Weir pointed out, with that same tiny little undercurrent of desperate amusement that only comes with being completely overwhelmed.  Lydia smiled wryly.

“You’d be surprised,” she said.  “I come from a little town in California called Beacon Hills.”

.

The woman in the nearly-empty campus library was perfectly, crisply pressed, not a single hair loose from the tight braided-up knot on the back of her head, not a rumpled crease to be seen.  She certainly didn’t look like she’d ever set foot out of the controlled and formal environment of a Stateside military base in her life.

Appearances could be deceiving.  Hoskins had seen this one’s file.

Nothing of any interest had gone on in the town of Beacon Hills since before the Stargate program was even founded, and there was no telling what other creatures of her own kind Lydia Martin had encountered over the past fifteen years.  Most of her known associates from childhood were the blandest of civilians to any outward appearances.  Somebody would investigate them further, eventually.  In the mean time there were known aliens living freely in Colorado, flaunting their very existence among the good people of Earth.  Certain things took priority over stalking English teachers.

This one had potential, though.  This one might be just what they needed.

“Captain Argent,” Hoskins said.  She raised her head from her textbook, mild polite interest on her face.

“Yes sir?” she asked, though she didn’t stand or come to attention.

“I’d like to talk to you,” he said.  “May I sit?”

She wasn’t Lydia Martin, but, well.  The Trust would take what they could get.


End file.
